I have been finding the occasional half hour or so to work on my Bessler-wheel and I am confident it will be finished some time in September or October. I’m away for a week in September but I hope to finish it once I return from my brief holiday.
I'm assuming that this latest construction will work - and my test mechanisms does perform exactly as I planned. There have been minor construction problems which had to be overcome along the way but so far I have dealt successfully with each one. They are not serious setbacks, typically, a case of rearranging some pieces so they don’t collide with other parts of the same mechanism.
Despite the apparent difficulties in understanding the clues and interpreting them correctly the concept is not complicated and Bessler could have provided easier clues, but then his fear of someone interpreting them too soon, prevented him. This raises an interesting question. Did he ever expect anyone to decipher his clues in his lifetime? One would assume not, in which case, why did he think someone would be able to do so after his death? Was there some additional clue that he hoped would assist in deciphering his clues after his death. I mention this because I have not found any evidence that anyone attempted to solve the clues during his life time.
I’m sure that, in the event that he failed to find a buyer for his secret, he intended to leave enough information available after his death to allow people to reconstruct his machine and give him the acknowledgement he so desperately needed. He commented on that very point in his Apologia Poetica and said he'd be content with post humus acknowledgement if he failed to sell his secret. That document was published in 1715, only three years after his first claim to have built a working perpetual motion machine, so even then he was considering the possibility of no-sale and what he could do about it.
One can imagine the frustration he suffered, thinking that he could sell his secret quickly and get on with his future plans but then discovering things were not as easy as he had thought. After only three years he was considering his options, and yet he continued for another ten years at Kassel castle without a sale. No wonder he was described as ill-tempered and unpleasant.
In my book I surmised that since he sought permission to build a grave or mausoleum in the garden of his house in Carlshafen, it might have contained a clue, but unfortunately the latest estimate is that the garden is now part of a car park in town, so probably the gravestones which might have held a useful clue, have long since been obliterated or lost.
There is the possibility that the Maschinen Tractate drawings which he destroyed were intended to reveal the secret after his death because they would be found in his effects. But as he wrote, the arrest made him destroy them, because once he was incarcerated someone might have gained access to his possessions, or his wife might have sold them, and the secret would be worthless.
JC
