During this curious journey we Besslerites travel, we often suffer the hardships associated with long adventures, but ours are not like those normally encountered with such enterprises. Little physical hardship is encountered, unless it is the occasional injury caused by a unfortunate misguided application of force to a hammer, screwdriver of spanner (wrench) to a tender part of one's anatomy.
No, the tribulations we commonly encounter are the ups and downs of an emotional nature - an intangible kind. Initially the curiosity and inclination to believe that Johann Bessler really did discover the secret of building a working perpetual motion machine fills us with premature happy anticipation that maybe we can discover how he did it. Then reality takes a swipe at such misplaced optimism, because the mighty scientific institutions which guide our knowledge enhancement, dismiss such ideas with tumultuous scorn. But then again, you read and reconsider the convincing evidence that Bessler did not lie and you feel that perhaps this is a paradox. It seems highly believable and yet it simply cannot be, because the greatest scientific minds of the last 300 years cannot be wrong. Absolutely not!
So how can we explain this apparent impass? At the heart of the matter is a certain vagueness about several defintions which seems to cloud the issue. The term 'perpetual motion' has an aura of mystery and magic which is attractive and persuasive and if you've seen the strong circumstantial evidence that Bessler's claims were genuine, you may have discussed the issue of perpetual motion and come to the conclusion that in fact the term is faulty for a number of reasons and perhaps it would be better to call it continuous motion subject to the presence of gravity. Bessler told us that the weights themselves constitute the whole apparatus and therefore, without gravity there would be no motion. Forget the definitions, they are doubtfull, subject to interpretation and misleading.
The search for a solution is a road with many forks each of which has so far led us up blind alleys, dead ends and cul-de-sacs. Our emotions switch violently from intense exhilaration when we believe we know the answer to the depths of depression when we discover our design was wrong.
Regardless of this setback we continue with the search because we are of the opinion that Johann Bessler told the truth. In which case three hundred years of complete dismissal by the elite (a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society - they think!) that his wheel is and was impossible, is too big a target to ignore. Think what a massive boost to the ego of every person who spent much of his or her life, searching for the elusive secret which Bessler found; and being constantly reminded of the foolishness of their quest, to discover that they were right and our teachers were wrong.. How wonderful it will be, to show those nay-saying, know-it-all, condescending experts that they got it wrong.
The truth is that we all instinctively know that Bessler's wheel was genine. There is an account in one famous book about the search for perpetual motion which describes the author's discussion about the subject with an experienced engineer, (Perpetual Motion - The History of an Obsession - Arthur Ord-Hume). The engineer dismissed the possibility of anyone ever succeeding in building a perpetual motion machine because they flouted the laws of physics - and that was the end of the matter, or so the author thought. A few days later the engineer returned to see the author, and said that even though he knew it was impossible he had done some sketches showing how he thought it might be achieved. That illustrates the dilemma facing all of us; even though we have been taught that they are not possible we each of us know instinctively that such machine are possible. It's intuitive that with the correct arrangement of weights a wheel will rotate continuously within the field of gravity.
NB, one commenter requested a picture of the air rifle on the wall in Bessler's portrait. I am not aware of any such thing, but in the interests of clarity I have added a copy of the portrait which Bessler looked through because it contains items which could be thought of as an air rifle.
JC
