Inside Bessler's Wheel?

What follows is pure speculation but hopefully of interest.

When I read about the speed of Bessler's first two wheels turning at more than 50 revolutions per minute, I thought that it should be possible to configure the mechanism so that it caused the wheel to turn at precisely 60 rpm, to measure the passing of one minute.

Since the 17th century, clocks have been regulated by the swinging of a pendulum to obtain accurate timing.  They were notoriously inaccurate at first, but since those early days improvements in the design of clocks has been made over the years to narrow the accuracy down to a fraction of a second per day.

Several witnesses to the demonstrations of Bessler’s wheel’s remarked on the great regularity of their rotation and I thought that this could be indicative of the presence of one or more pendulums.  Given this possibility perhaps we might estimate the approximate length of any such pendulums used within the one-way wheels at least.

The time that it takes a pendulum to swing is governed by just two factors: the mass of the Earth and the length of the pendulum from the fulcrum to the centre of gravity of the weight. Nothing else is of significant importance.  The earth’s mass is a constant so it’s just the length of the pendulum that governs its swing speed.

I’m not suggesting that there were pendulums inside the wheel, but I believe there were weighted levers.  In falling these might behave like a restricted  pendulum.  We know that modern clocks use shortened pendulums for greater accuracy as they swing faster but knowing that a one second pendulum is just under a meter long, or about 39 inches suggests that the levers inside Bessler 's wheel might have been longer to account for the speed of over 50 rpm, but less than 60 rpm.

One Leipzig Ell equalled 22.4 inches, so two Ells would give a length of 44.6 inches which might just give a speed of over 50rpm. The first wheel was six and a half feet in diameter which could perhaps accomodate pendulums of three foot, four inches.
 (First wheel size corrected, see http://www.besslerwheel.com/wwwboard/messages2/3603.html  and if you click on the link you will perhaps notice that I mispelled the so-called original German text for 'three' which should begin with the letter 'd' not 'b'!  I just added this in case someone notices the error and brings it up here.)

So if Bessler simply chose to use levers of two Ells length or 44 inches and then built the wheel around their action, we can understand something about the size of the first wheels and what potential speed and power each might be capable of achieving.  Contrary to intuition, shorter levers might generate faster rotation?  Heavier weights more power?

In addition to the weighted levers, Bessler casually gives us more information about what is inside his wheels. In AP,XXXIII part 2, page 340 in my edition, he comments about Wagner, "If I arrange to have just one cross-bar in the machine, it revolves very slowly, just as if it can hardly turn itself at all, but, on the contrary, when I arrange several bars, pulleys and weights, the machine can revolve much faster,." In my opinion the bars he refes to are weighted levers, and he includes pulleys which implies chains of cords or ropes to run around them.

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JC