A Guiding Hand - or Predictable Evolution of Humankind.

Admitted ages of some visitors to this blog;

71,  47,  49, 52, 65, 67,  79, 49, 23, 69, 60, 64, 36, 74 1/2 and I’m 74 5/6ths!

I noted in my last blog, that most of us who continue to seek the solution to Bessler’s wheel seem to be in our 50s, 60s and 70s. I know there are some who are younger but this subject does seem to be occupied mainly by this age range.  But I don’t think it’s specifically our age that accounts for it, because most have been on this quest for many years, so it isn’t necessarily something we have turned to later in life.

Maybe it is the effect of the internet that younger people don’t feel the pull of curiosity to try to find out how Bessler did it 300 plus years ago. I’m not aware of any kind of publication that actually presented Bessler in a positive light before I published my own book.  Yes there is a huge history about all those poor misguided inventors who believed it possible to make a perpetual motion machine, but in every case the author either dismissed their work as impossible, sad, ridiculous or as the much respected Rupert Gould, suggested, “we must assume an imposition”.  It may be my imagination, but I detected some regret in Gould’s words, as if he wanted to believe it but could not say so for the risk of ridicule.  He went on to restore John Harrison’s incredible marine chronometers and he continued to investigate unsolved mysteries of all kinds.

Perhaps the internet with its complex coverage of all things weird and wonderful, mysterious and amazing provides such a plethora of subjects both real and imagined, that the legend of Bessler’s wheel gets lost in the avalanche of information.  This tremendous treasury didn’t exist in such a convenient form when many of us first became curious about perpetual motion and Johann Bessler.  It was there in libraries around Europe, but largely inaccessible. So in 1996 when I completed my research prior to self-publishing my biography on Bessler those who might have been curious would need to have been adults I guess, so later in the age of the established internet my work probably got subsumed among all the other wealth of information. 

I noted some pleasing connections between Gould who repaired Harrison’s clocks, and Gould’s accurate  account of Johann Bessler; Harrisons description of John Rowley as the finest craftsman in England; Rowley’s absolute conviction that Bessler was genuine; Bessler’s price for his secret exactly the same as the British government’s reward for the inventor of a method of establishing a ship’s longitudinal al position  at sea - £20,000; the prize won by Harrison.

It was 1712 when Bessler first exhibited his wheel, and in that exact same year, in Dudley, England, Thomas Newcomen set up the worlds first successful steam engine used for pumping water out of mines.  Talk about bad timing!  But actually it was just that Bessler’s wheel arrived about 300 years too early.   The steam age had to run its course first, and then the internal combustion engine, each consuming vast quantities fossil fuels, readily available without concerns or realisation of the damaging output of these various forms of power generation.

But now Bessler’s time has come.  It’s almost as if there was some guiding hand prompting the advances in industrial technology, only Bessler arrived too soon, out of his correct place in the timeline. Electricity arrived in time to take advantage of the steam engine, the petrol engine, the windmill, solar energy, hydroelectric power - it’s a long list and electricity has been there for most the time, just waiting for the right moment for Bessler’s wheel to arrive.

Although it had a long lead-in time, about 2500 years, knowledge of electricity eventually resulted in electric motors towards the end of the 19th century, but the steam age lingered on along side the petrol engine, which is still with us along side the electric motor.  But events are conspiring to make us find new ways to generate electricity, due to an excess of carbon dioxide, according to “experts”, caused by all the fossil fuel being burned. Electricity seems to be the ultimate power source for all things, but finding a method of generating enough in a clean, inexpensive way without affecting the world we live in, be it cities or the rainforest and everything in between, is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The effects of global warming, only now being taken more seriously, have applied pressure to the world of science and technology.  But the old pressures of peer review, job security, research funding and potential social embarrassment guide the researchers and technology experts into the straitjacket of toeing  the line, and avoiding at all costs any idea of challenging the established opinions of past “experts”. Anyone who proposes the possibility of a gravity-enabled device which is in continuous motion is assigned to the lunatic fringe.

I mentioned a “guiding hand” suggesting that now was the perfect time for Bessler’s wheel to make it’s triumphal entry on the world’s stage, and even though I’m an atheist, sometimes one can almost sense the actions of some guiding principle in humanity’s progress towards some future state invisible to us now.  Perhaps if Thomas Newcomen had had an accident in his workshop, say a boiler blew up killing him and all of his research, Bessler would have been available to take over the reins of progress in his own field of expertise. Or perhaps if Peter the Czar of Russia hadn’t died on his way to visit Bessler to buy his machine, would the steam age have taken off the way it did?  Actually I don’t think much would have changed, only the detail and emphasis on certain types of power generation.  So perhaps Bessler’s machine was a fall back position in case Newcomen failed to deliver? Maybe, but now is the time, it’s perfect!

JC