Sharing Information - Part One

1) As planned I’m sharing information both here and on the Besslerwheel.com forum Besslerwheel forum . So here is the first part. All of the clues originate from the drawings and text in Grundlicher Bericht, Apologia Poetica, Das Triumphirende and Maschinen Tractate. I will try to keep the details brief and to the point so I won’t be showing where and how I obtained the answers but you can probably work out some of them.

Most people are aware of the ubiquity of the number 5 encoded in all of Bessler's publications and many don't see any significance other than perhaps a nod to some kind of mystery school teaching designed to hint at the inventor's knowledge of ancient wisdom. I don't believe that theory, I'm convinced that Bessler was passing on information.

I have always thought that there were two hard facts established about the internal workings of Bessler's wheel and one of them was that there were five mechanisms. The other was that the weights worked in pairs. All else is open to conjecture. But one certainty is that Bessler thought that this piece of information was extremely important and even encoded it in his name right from the moment he adopted the pseudonym, Orffyreus.

I’m well aware that many people dismiss my belief that Bessler used five mechanisms in his wheel but in fact I would go further than that and state that he designed wheels which all had an odd number of mechanism.  In [i]Maschinen Tractate (MT)[/i] he suggested this with the following number system, see below:-

He identifies the odd numbers as you see by placing a ‘Z’ next to the odd numbers to provide a clue.  There are other clues offering the same information that he used  5, 7 and 9 mechanisms.

The plethora of references to the number five also include a number of pointers to the pentagram.  The geometric figure is embedded in many drawings and I’ll show one below.  Bessler was familiar with the books by Euclid and in this case he referred to Euclid’s 11th proposition, which ran thus::-

“To inscribe an equilateral and equiangular pentagon in a given circle….”

In the above illustration A to C is what I call the ‘rope line’ on Bessler’s illustration  of the Merseburg wheel.  The ‘padlock line’ is the line from  C to the middle of CD. This mimics Euclid’s construction. Measure the angle CAD on Weissenstein illustration, it is 36 degrees. This is composed of the two 18 degrees angles.  The angles at C and D  are each 72 degrees. Note they align with the hatching lines on Bessler’s illustration.

The fact that the wheel includes such a clear link to Euclid’s pentagram construction confirms its presence is deliberate.

To make the point, here are three ways of confirming the pentagram within the Apologia Wheel.

….and his alternative method, and note how the red and blue lines are designed to skim the edges of the two inner circles.  Finally the white angles are 24 degrees.  24 x 3 = 72,  5 x 72 = 360.  

There is another clue in the chronograms above this wheel which points to the number 55.

2) Another of Bessler’s way of showing the importance of two number 5’s as a pair is revealed in the illustration below. 

JEEB, (his initials), J is the 10th letter, two letters E, which are the 5th letter.  He added the J and one of the Es to his forename when he succeeded in building his first PM wheel. J represents double 5, underlined by two 5’s as letter E.

JEEB using the Caesar shift becomes WRRO.  R is the 18th letter.  W 23rd letter which may only be there for the following reason, W is composed of two Roman numerals, V meaning 5.

He often, (dozens of times) hand wrote the letter W as shown below, as two Roman numerals linked together, and you can see it twice in the accompanying passage.  They are linked to point to them as pairing, but not in the same 5th segment of the wheel.

Bessler used any opportunity to put a veiled reference to these numbers.  I should also point out that the 2G’s, refers to his enemy in chief Andreas  Gärtner.  The 2 W’s refers to another enemy, Christian Wagner, the two B’s refer to the third enemy, Johann Gottfried Borlach.

3)  Although I’ve discussed the Toys page several times I’ll briefly run through some things again because they are relevant.

First there are the four numbers added to the bottom left corner - 138, 139, 140 and 141.  Was Bessler trying to reach the number 141 to get the only factors. 3 x 47, which might link to the three images on MT47? 

Was he pointing to Euclid’s 47th construction i.e, “in any right triangle, the square of the two sides connected to the right angle is equal to the square of the third side called the hypotenuse?”  Also known as the 3-4-5 right angle?

Or was it the total of 558?  558 seems meaningless unless you simply add them together to get 18.  18 being the basic number upon which all the others are multiples of, in the pentagram, thus number 5 again.

Secondly there is the carefully drawn  number 5. placed  near to the comment about children’s games.  The fact that it has full stop or period with it means it’s a standalone clue or hint, it doesn’t really relate to the number of children’s games. This is also linked to the pentagram.

Thirdly the figures in the Toys page can be divided by 5, see the image below.

I first posted a blog about this back in 2012.  Notice figure A, it is simply five copies of figure C.  Partial copies yes, but the inference is strong.  The straight line between each of the figures in A, represents a length of cord or rope.  There is one mechanism and one weight within each of the five segments of a pentagram.

Bessler says (paraphrased) that the weights work in pairs. That means one weight from each of two adjoining segments work together, but only when they are at the lowest point in rotation. This will be shown to be part of Bessler’s “connectedness principle”, but there is more to know about that.  

The reason for the inclusion of figures C and D is that they form a pair at each advance in rotation of one fifth.  When C falls, it pulls D back up a little.

The second figure D, has no arms so although it has weights i.e. an axe, it cannot move of itself, because it has already fallen - so has to be moved by another similar figure, i.e. figure C.  Note that figure D has spirals around its body, this is to show that it lies at a different angle to figure C, because it is in the adjacent 5th segment. There is a length of cord running between each of the figures in A, when the active figure C, falls, he pulls the inactive fallen figure D upwards towards its former position.

One of Bessler’s asides includes the following:- a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls a quarter, causes four pounds to shoot upwards four quarters.” 

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 - a figure he embedded in the first drawings in both Grundlicher Bericht and Das Triumphirende - and a quarter of an hour or fifteen minutes covers 90 degrees.

Even though he used the word ‘quarter' twice, and in the first instance it  referred to the 90 degrees in 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 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.  Twice at least, Bessler informs us elsewhere that the weight is indeed raised 30 degrees.  

This explains how a fallen weight “shoots” upwards, a 90 degree fall will be able to lift an equal weight quickly.

JC

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