Friday 10 November 2017

Johann Bessler's so-called Cross-Bars

Each of these code-sharing posts will be simultaneously posted on the www.besslerwheel.com forum as well as here on my blog, so that I have my own record of the posts in this subject.

Each post will contain information I have found in Bessler's books which will hopefully help towards designing the actual mechanisms, and should convince those who believe that Bessler left no information about the actual mechanisms within his wheels, that in fact everything we need can be found if you know where and how to look.

Much has been written about Johann Bessler’s puzzling comment about his use of  cross-bars and I think it’s time I shared what I believe to be the truth about them.

In his Apologia Poetica, on page 71 of part two, he wrote, “If I arrange to have just one cross-bar in the machine, it revolves very slowly, just as if it can hardly turn itself, but on the contrary, when I arrange several cross-bars, pulleys and weights, the machine can revolve much faster, and throw Wagner’s calculations clean out of the window!”

That’s how it appeared in the English translation at the back of my publication of Bessler’s Apologia Poetica.  But a couple of years ago I decided to go back to basics and looked up the word creuze which appears twice in the above quote in the original German.  The word creuze was translated as cross-bar because it was one of dozens of alternative meanings in a huge German/English dictionary I owned, and seemed to be the best fit with Bessler’s description of his mechanism.

But I could not understand how it might be possible to design the wheel with just one cross-bar and it was then that I resolved to check out the whole translation myself.  The word creuze has one obvious equivalent in English and is the basic meaning in German, and it is cross.  There is one obvious place in Bessler’s entire output of mechanical drawings which can be described as a cross and it is in the scissor mechanisms.

The scissor mechanisms is an essential ingredient in the design of the wheel, according to Bessler.  It is obvious when you look at the picture below that the red parts are indeed crosses and in my opinion Bessler is suggesting that one linkage, or cross was scarcely sufficient to turn the wheel but more of them made the wheel turn faster.


The inclusion of the words weights and pulleys along with crosses, suggests that the three items are connected in some way, one of them being the scissor mechanisms.  This solves the puzzle of having “just one cross-bar”, because you could have several crosses on each mechanism.

In a subsequent post I'll show that there were only two X's required, although you can see 8 in the above picture which is from the Toys page in MT, if you include the two handles.  This suggests that more will be better?

You can see from the above single scissor mechanism that one X would provide the minimum  extension.  Two would give more extension.

JC


10 comments:

  1. Even if I don't care about Besslers hints too much, I've to admit to realize why these linkages could have very much importance. They allow to translate a distance on a straight line!

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  2. You are on the right track with this John. I have written about this in my new private forum on Besslerwheel. You are a member, but the forum seems to have some kind or technical problem affecting the users. Keep up the good work.

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  3. Looks like we have a horse race on who's going to get to the full disclosure finish line first. My money is on John.

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  4. I think what you re doing is making the subject much more enigmatical and inaccessible. People may think that it is impossible to find a solution without breaking "the code".

    I'll be away for a while. Good luck to you all.

    yellow

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    Replies
    1. Sorry you are leaving, I have barely got started on at least 50 posts about the so-called code. What I have to share is not so much encoded as hidden within the drawings and right under our noses for the last 300 years.

      JC

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  5. I have built a couple of these devices and was quite impressed with the resulting movement. With a small, but powerful input the mechanism would just leap. By having the crosses at less of an angle it was much easier to get movement. Thanks John for making me review this pieces of the puzzle. What about the A that starts in drawing 83 and repeats in numerous drawings afterwards. I have just made a couple of these and am discovering amazing aspects. Note that one foot on the A is always larger. Similar to the design in the Masonic symbols

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  6. Further to the above post we can make some assumptions.

    1. The crosses as described above, apply to one of several similar mechanisms within the wheel

    2. The inclusion of the pulleys and the weights at the same time as the crosses suggests that the three are related and possibly connected.

    3. The presence of pulleys implies the need for a cord or rope.

    3. The inclusion of a weight within this sentence suggest that a weight is on the end of the scissors mechanisms as shown in the picture from the Toys page.

    4. The scissor mechanism extends or contracts and the pulley and cord mentioned together suggests the scissor mechanism pulls the cord to lift or pull something else.

    JC

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  7. Hello, John. In Bessler's quote in AP, p. 71, may I ask you which is the German word for 'pulley'? Google translator does not find it...

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    1. In English we call a part of gear train, a pulley. In AP the German word is “Züge”, which means “train” as in gear train. An excellent web site with an excellent German to English dictionary, or other language, can be found at https://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/

      Hope this helps.

      JC

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  8. Thanks, John. It will help!
    ---------------
    If "Kreuz" means 'scissors', and if the scissors have to extend or contract, we may think that one handle is free to go down, while the other one is fixed: in the drawing, obviously, one handle is longer than the other one.
    When the mechanism is placed on one side of the wheel, the free handle, when going down, opens the scissors and makes the length shorter.
    When placed on the other side, the free handle, when going down, shuts the scissors and makes the length longer.

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