The “great craftsman phrase” interpreted.

What follows is my interpretation of the “great craftsman phrase”.  In his Apologia Poetica, Bessler included many clues, some encoded and some merely ambiguously phrased so that getting the true meaning from each was a struggle.  The one I discuss here is one of the most puzzling, however in the following explanation I hope that the meaning becomes clear.

He wrote, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls a quarter, causes four pounds to shoot upwards four quarters.”  This curious phrase seems on the face of it to be nonsense and yet by picking it apart one can get at the meaning.   What Bessler sought to do was to tell us what to do but disguise it from the casual reader; however it has turned out more difficult than perhaps he anticipated.

Note that within the quote he mentions that there are five weights, one plus four, and each one is equal to one pound.  Secondly, one pound falls a quarter.  How do we define what he meant by a quarter? In this case he was referring to a clock - something he also included in the first drawings in both Grundlicher Bericht and Das Triumphirende - and a quarter of an hour or fifteen minutes covers 90 degrees.  But how could this single right angle fall cause “ four pounds to shoot upwards four quarters”? 

There has been so much discussion about what this brief phrase means, and much puzzlement – and yet once you know what it really means, it is very simple.  We saw in the first part that the word ‘quarter', referred to, not just 90 degrees but also to a clock.  In the second part the word ‘quarter' also refers to a clock but this time he has confused us by using the words ‘four quarters’. ‘Four quarter’s equals ‘one whole hour’.  Each hour on a clock is divided into 30 degrees, so the words ‘four quarters’ meaning ‘one hour’ as used here equals thirty degrees.  To paraphrase Bessler’s words, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls 90 degrees, causes each of the other four pounds to shoot upwards 30 degrees.”  

You might think that that is unremarkable and wouldn't achieve the result we seek, but as with all Bessler information you have to work at it and I have more information to share on this phrase, but at this point I will just say that it is not necessary for the weight being lifted to rise as far as it fell at this point in rotation.

You might also think it would have been better to have said that “one pound falls 90 degrees, causes one pound to shoot upwards 30 degrees”, but that would have removed the information that five weights, and therefore five mechanisms were involved, so it had to be four weights plus the one.  Also do not assume that I am saying that there were only five weights involved, there are more, another five for each of the scissor mechanisms.

This removes the problem of lifting four weights, or just one weight, higher than the same weight falls.

JC