It has always seemed to me that the drawings in Das Triumphirende were really rather uninteresting and repetitive. But I took note of his comments about studying Apologia Poetica, and also at the front of his Maschinen Tractate his suggestion that studying more than one drawing might lead someone to the correct design and thus the solution. This appeared to refer to the drawings in MT, and perhaps they did, but I wondered if they might also hint at other drawings elsewhere.
If Bessler was serious about leaving the information on how to build his perpetual motion machine to posterity, I never believed mere words would suffice, there had to be that information in one or more drawings. The hints Bessler left in AP were made many years before the MT had been started so the advice, although added later due to the arrest, is more likely to have referred to those earlier drawings. I noted several apparent errors in the two drawings of the Merseberg wheel and subsequently found the pentagram which is unarguably present - and the clock which is also self-evidently a deliberate addition.
I explained the clock previously, how it points to the number 55 - 12 x 55 = 660, that being the total of all the numbers labelling the parts, (even after taking into consideration that the number 24 was changed to 42) in both Merseberg drawings. So to cut a long story short I discovered over a very long time what I believe to be Bessler’s design.
I know that people are impatient to know what I think I’ve discovered or if it is worth anything and I understand that. I will post everything, but if I just post the design I won’t have shown how and why I arrived at it, and it will look like mere speculation whereas if I can ‘prove’ that each point is derived from a clue within the drawing it might give people more confidence that I’m right.
So the four drawings in Das Triumphirende contain just about all the information you need to build Bessler’s wheel. The Toys page helps to confirm some details and there are numerous clues all over the place pointing to - dare I say it? - the numbers 5 and 55. So today a brief suggestion about that number!
Below is a simple drawing illustrating why five mechanisms are needed. That is all the room there is. I’m not saying that it has to be five but I’m sure it is the minimum number. Alternatives are 7 and 9. The reason for using odd numbers will become clear in subsequent posts, it is simply a result of the design used and it might be possible using an alternative method to have even numbers of mechanisms.
There is much more to add to the above drawing (using up to about 50 posts!) and it is simply to show why there are five mechanisms in this particular version.
JC
