Between 1960, when I first read Gould’s excellent account of Bessler’s wheel and 1974 when I built my first attempt at replicating it out of balsa wood and washers, my thoughts were confined to my mind and numerous scraps of paper and pencil drawings. From then until about 1980 little changed until I made up my mind to try to obtain as much hard information about Johann Bessler and his perpetual motion machine as I could possibly manage. This was of course before the internet made this kind of task so much easier.
I joined the British Museum Library and was able to actually touch and handle GB, AP and DT. Subsequently I obtained poor copies of those same documents, but I couldn’t read them. I advertised in a local newspaper for anyone who could translate 18th C German into English. Amazingly I was contacted by four people, one of whom was Mike Senior who became a good friend over the next twenty years or so.
He translated everything into English, handwriting it and adding a number of notes about what he had done. He asked me if I wanted a literal word by word translation or what he said would be his best impression of what Bessler wrote, conveying meaning and nuance where possible. I chose the latter because I simply didn’t know what was in the documents at that time.
Seeing as we all make use of his translations I should say a word or two about Mike. For a start he was was a polymath and a member of MENSA. He was consultant to the local authority on flora, having a Masters Degree in Botany in fact several degrees in different unrelated subjects - he was just curious about everything. He read and spoke 18th C German, read and translated Latin and could quote from memory from all the Greek classical plays in the original Greek. He was an expert on astrophysics and wrote papers for peer review in scientific journals. He loved Maths problems and tried to explain String Theory and Riemann’s Conjecture to me, for example. It went straight over my head at very high altitude! He also like his beer! There was so much more to Mike but space is limited. But he did once say to me, “of course you do realise that what Bessler claimed is impossible”. We laughed and agreed to disagree.
Once I had the translations plus a number of other documents about Bessler, also in German and needing translating, I set about writing my own biography of Bessler, trying hard to stick to the facts as presented. Most of these were either letters to and from and about Bessler, or items from the local newspapers of the time. Included were accounts of several official examinations arranged by certain men of high standing including Karl the Landgrave of Hesse Kassel who agreed to offer his patronage and support but only if he had first satisfied himself that the machine was genuine
I was unable to get a publisher in the U.K. to publish my book, although I only sent it to about a dozen publishers having written the manuscript in one year. I read that JK Rowling took seven years to write her first book! Maybe I should have held out for more publishers, but I was impatient, and decided to self publish.
Later I decided in addition to PM:AAMS? to self publish GB, AP, DT and MT. It wasn’t profitable at all but it enabled me to just about cover my costs in running several web sites.
While this was happening I continued with my day job and in my spare time constructed many PM wheels. I began this blog back in April 2009. It’s alarming to see how confident I was back then - nothing’s changed!
I’ve done numerous radio interviews both here and abroad. I was invited to Rome to take part in a documentary about Bessler. Unfortunately it was all in Italian, even my words were dubbed in so I don’t even know what I said let alone what the rest of the cast said. It was a bit of a set up as the other speakers were traditional scientists following the classic path that it was impossible.
I was asked to lecture at the Glastonbury Crop circle symposium in the mid 1990s and met Brian O’Leary a trained astronaut although he didn’t complete his training. It was a strange gig, which resulted in me discovering I could dowse for water, not a very useful trick these days, but curiously rewarding.
I also did a radio interview from home, here in England with Redneck radio in Greenwood, USA. Hilarious but good fun.
There is so much more but I don’t want to bore the pants off you!
JC
GB Grundliccher Bericht
AP Apologia Poetica
DT Das Triumphirende
"Maybe I should have held out for more publishers, but I was impatient, and decided to self publish."
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing wrong with self-publishing. What's important is to get your ideas into a written form and available to those who want to learn more about them. With self-publishing you don't have to waste time and emotional energy trying to appease agents and editors who, never actually having written much if anything themselves, try to get you to rewrite your work to meet THEIR expectations of what a "good" book should be. Their definition of "good" is really what will put as much profits into THEIR pockets as possible!
Self publishing, once looked down upon by the mainstream publishers, is now here to stay and will eventually put them out of business!
I did get some interest from Bloomsbury Publishing but they said my book was way too long and said they’d reconsider it if I halved it - which I managed to do. It was such a painful exercise but apparently a common experience among writers. Unfortunately Bloomsbury we’re taken over by another publisher and all their manuscripts under consideration were shelved.
DeleteI also had a firm offer from a German publisher but because I failed to include my references/sources they couldn’t wait for me to go through my notes to dig them out. That was a pity as they were going to translate my words into German, but without the sources they would have had to translate my English translations back into German. That could have really messed things up!
JC
I dont have your books John but i must say those publishers were going to flush bessler story down the drain .
DeleteToday is "Veteran's Day" in the US which was actually celebrated yesterday, Friday, because November 11th this year was on a weekend. Many younger people in the US and around the world only have a vague idea of what this day commemorates.
ReplyDeleteIt is called "Armistice Day" or "Remembrance Day" in other parts of the world where it is observed. In the US it was originally intended to celebrate the signing of an armistice or cease fire by the remaining combatant, Germany, in "The Great War" or "War to End All Wars" that was later called World War 1. Previous armistices had been already agreed to by Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, and Austria-Hungry. The cease fire took place on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11 month of 1918 and put an end to the fighting on land, sea, and air. This cease fire was not a surrender by Germany. The terms of that would be worked out later in the "Treaty of Versailles" which was signed in 1919 and, as part of Germany's surrender and a peace treaty, put severe penalties on Germany for starting the war. Germany grudgingly signed that treaty. It is generally acknowledged that it was the harshness of that treaty's reparations that set the stage for World War 2 which was even bloodier than World War 1 and put Hitler and his genocidal Nazis in control of Europe and a large part of western Russia. This holiday originally honored the many physical and mental sacrifices made by just those who fought in World War 1, but after World War 2 and the Korean War, it was celebrated to honor all who served or are serving in the US military in any capacity.
World War 1 was the first "modern" war in which technology was used to increase the carnage and, as a result, the total military and civilian casualties reached about 40 MILLION. What's so amazing about this is that the whole thing was triggered by the assassination of only TWO people...the younger brother of the emperor of Austria, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, in June of 1914 in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo by a separatist fanatic named Gavrilo Princip. There had, however, been growing tensions for the previous half century between many of the combatant nations and a complex web of mutual defense treaties that pulled them all into the war when that triggering event occurred. It was like the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
While the US only lost 117,000 because it was late to enter the conflict, Great Britain and Ireland lost 1,350,000. One of the most horrific battles was the "Battle of the Somme" that took place in 1916. The British lost 19,000 soldiers on the FIRST day of the battle...and that was before lunch! They found out the hard way how deadly the newly perfected German machine guns could be. Five months later they had lost 57,000 and the casualties for all combatants in that one battle was more than 1 million killed or wounded.
The first world war was such a shock to humanity that it was declared "The War to End All Wars" because everyone thought humanity could never be so foolish as to do something like that again.
How very wrong they would be!
Anonymous and PROUD of it!
"...humanity could never be so foolish as to do something like that again."
DeleteSad to say but the world looks like it's at the beginning of WWIII right now! There's war in Eastern Europe, war in the Middle East, and China can't wait to invade and take over Taiwan. I think that the US has decided it's time for "regime change" in Iran to put an end to their genocidal clerics funding terrorism throughout the Middle East and threatening the survival of Israel. That regime change is going to require a lot of bombing of Iranian military sites followed by a huge troop invasion involving the US and all of its allies.
I think they've decided that this is now necessary because Iran is only about 3 months away from making nuclear bombs and if they get them it won't be long before some of the terrorists get them and USE THEM! In the coming world war I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of low power tactical nukes are used on military as well as civilian targets. I think they will try to avoid using the bigger hydrogen bombs carried by those ICBMs so they don't destroy all of human civilization. Just enough low power nukes to try to change the borders on the maps of the world. Millions will die for those new maps to be drawn. Meanwhile, the weapon makers and the undertakers will be making more profits then they ever dreamed possible!
Also thanks AAPOI for giving such a short and accurate history of the November 11th day of observance. Hopefully one day humanity will finally wake up to what a tremendous waste in lives and money wars really are and learn to avoid them. Unfortunately that day is no time soon, imo.
Thank you for both for your sobering comment on this Remembrance Day. It shouldn’t be necessary after WWI and WWII, to point out the incredible waste of lives and money, but there is always someone somewhere looking for more power and more money and willing to expend other people’s lives in the aim of achieving both.
DeleteJC
@anon 02:43
DeleteThat tactical nuke only WWIII you are predicting is really scary. The entire world is currently on shaky economic ground and such a war could push it over the edge into a total global economic meltdown.
I can imagine the cost of gasoline tripling overnight as the cost everything we buy also triples. We'll see looting everywhere by people desperate for food for themselves and their families. The holy men will quickly use this crisis to promote their delusional religions. Democratic governments could fall and be replaced by dictatorships. All we can do is hope that everything settles down. But the world was hoping the same thing would happen in the 1930's and we saw that it made no difference in preventing WWII.
I often wonder if things like wars, famines, and plagues are part of some natural process that has to take place to reduce the human population until it matches the resources available to it. If your tactical nukes only WWIII gets out of control, it could turn into the version that does use the ICBM's and then those few surviving humans will actually be reduced to living like cave people during the Stone Age! Fawk, something like this could have been happening regularly for millions of years only we don't know about it yet!
All the wars are planned and they keep doing resets, look into Tartaria - an advanced civilisation that was wiped out, they had free energy.
DeleteRemote viewers, independently of each other have viewed an event early next year, starting in december or January that will change the world forever, bigger than 9/11.
https://clifhighvideos.com/20230916a/
Part One of Two Parts
DeleteHere's a theory I have which some may find interesting. Suppose I told you that practically all of the events following World War 1 to the present were because ONE man got sick?! Impossible? Consider the following.
In 1919 the US President Woodrow Wilson decided to personally attend the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles and took the long ship ride over to France for them. Wilson was a gentle man who was a pacifist and he didn't really want to involve the US in that European war. He only committed the US because German submarines began sinking US ships. The Americans were critical in forcing the Germans to surrender and soon became the heroes of the war. As a result, their leader Wilson's voice would carry much weight at the negotiations. Like Abraham Lincoln did after the US Civil War, Wilson basically wanted all of the combatants to pick up their equipment and return to their home nations with only the smallest changes in boundaries on maps. He did not want Germany, although it was the aggressor, to be hit with a lot of economic penalties. That, however, was not what the other members of the Allied Powers wanted. They wanted to impose the most harsh penalties possible to economically cripple Germany so they would never be a dangerous military power again. But, Wilson was a most persuasive speaker and he had such influence over the others at the treaty negotiations that he most likely could have gotten them to go along with his kinder plan.
And then, something most unfortunate happened after Wilson arrived in France. The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 (which did not start in Spain!) was still raging and Wilson was infected with it. During the treaty negotiations, he got so sick that he couldn't leave his bed for over a week. When he finally managed to get back to the negotiations, people noticed he wasn't the same person. Instead of being his usual robust spokesman for world peace and pushing through his plan to treat Germany far more kindly, he could not find his voice and others, not infected, managed to push their agenda through in the treaty terms. Wilson told one of his advisors that he dreaded the long sea voyage home although he couldn't wait to get back to the US.
Anonymous and PROUD of It!
Part Two of Two Parts
DeleteAs was learned with the recent Covid-19 pandemic, influenza viruses can have some serious affects on the human brain. These range from confusion to loss of smell and taste and even to fatal strokes. Coincidentally, Wilson did have a stroke later in 1919 that caused so much concern that US congressmen were seriously considering removing him from office. To cover up his disability, his second wife actually secretly ran the government for Wilson for almost two years and many consider her to have been the first unofficial woman US president! A few years after leaving office in 1921, Wilson had a final fatal stroke at age 67.
I'm convinced that the neurological effects of Wilson's infection are what really allowed the harsh treatment of Germany after World War 1 to be imposed and resulted in the economic problems in that nation that empowered the Nazis and Hitler to seize power. They were experts at rabble rousing and that job becomes much easier when the rabble is already angry. The Nazis, most of whom were veterans of the war, claimed that Germany should not have lost. Needing a convenient scapegoat, they blamed the communists and socialists in Germany and vowed to punish them if they got political power. They also injected their nonsense theories of racial purity into their propaganda and needed some "outsiders" to blame for "polluting" German blood. Well, we all know who they blamed and what the consequences were...the greatest crime in human history by the greatest criminals in history. The reign of the Third Reich led to deaths of tens of millions, the Cold War, and the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon. Almost all of the wars following World War 2 were actually proxy battles between the western democracies and eastern communists nations. Those eastern nations are still involved in the world's present conflicts in some way.
So, if my theory is right, it shows how the lives of everyone in the world can be affected by the chance events happening in the lives of certain key historical figures. Imo, Wilson was definitely one of those figures.
Anonymous and PROUD of It!
Your theory is really bizarre, AAPOI...which means it's probably true! I've often thought that if JFK had not been assassinated in 1963 then maybe we could have avoided getting involved in the Vietnam war for almost a decade and losing about 57,000 young American lives along with about 2 million Vietnamese lives. What if Hitler who was a corporal carrying messages from trench to trench during WWI had been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and been killed by an exploding shell fragment during that war? What if, instead of being crucified, Jesus had been beheaded like John the Baptist? What if Bessler had found a buyer for this wheels?
DeleteWhat if I hadn’t wandered into our small school library and happened to pick up Gould’s account of Bessler’s wheel? I would never have spent my life searching for original Bessler documents and published all those translations. Perhaps someone else might have done it…..maybe?
DeleteJC
@anon21:03
DeleteI think most big historical things that happen to humanity require a long chain of chance events taking place. If any link in that chain fails to happen, then the end result will be changed. But you do bring up some interesting ideas.
I also believe if JFK had lived there would have been no Vietnam war and the US economy would be in better shape today. However, if Hitler had been killed in WWI some other fanatical leader would have come along and used the anger of the defeated German people for some purpose like recapturing all of Europe but probably not Russia. I'm quite sure if Jesus was decapitated that his followers would have still stolen and hidden his head and body and then announced that he must have come back to life since his tomb was empty. They would have found people willing to swear they saw him walking around with his head attached to his body again! Later New Testament authors would then have elaborated those claims into Jesus meeting and dining with the apostles before floating up to heaven. Cults that are bringing in plenty of $$$ do not suddenly disappear just because their leader dies. They figure out a way to work it into their belief system.
Many think if Bessler had sold his wheel then there would be no fossil fuel based Industrial Revolution and we would have no Climate Change problems now. Sounds good, but I doubt that would have happened. Once the buyer got the wheel and revealed its secret, he would have started making duplicates to sell to other businessmen. But those sales would have quickly dropped off when they realized that the wheels could not provide even a fraction of the power of the early coal using steam engines. Yes, those engines were smelly and a pain to keep running, but their greater power output allowed much more work to be done in a day than Bessler's wheels could do.
For businessmen, time is money and the more products per day that they can make, the more profits they will make. However, maybe with improvements Bessler's wheels could have been able to compete with steam engines someday. Bessler, unfortunately was asking a lot of money for what to businessmen at the time seemed like an impractical invention that might never be improved to their satisfaction.
At time 22:09 JC wrote "Perhaps someone else might have done it…..maybe?"
DeleteThere could have been a thousand others who could have done it. But, it was YOU who made the effort and paid the costs first. YOU have the priority for the achievement and none of those other thousand. That will never change.
Interesting discussion of WWI which is something I never thought I'd ever see on a blog for pm wheels!
DeleteI found this rare photo of Wilson on his way into the Palace of Versailles for the signing of the peace treaty that officially ended WWI. He looks like he's trying to force a smile for the camera, but to me it looks like he was still shaky from that influenza he caught. Immediately after the signing was out of the way, he took off back to the US again. I assume the woman in front of him was his wife.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/DD73F5/president-wilson-at-versailles-to-sign-of-the-peace-treaty-july-1919-DD73F5.jpg
That signing, btw, took place inside the palace's famous "Hall of Mirrors" which, as the name implies, was lined with huge mirrors that made the hall look like it was much larger.
For those who want to know more about WWI, there was an excellent documentary made about it in 1965 titled "The Guns of August". It contains a lot of film footage taken during the various battles and gives one an idea of the horrendous conditions the troops had to deal. Follow this link to see it:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4zPg5Kv_ug
@anon 05:30
DeleteThanks for that link and I will watch it first chance I get.
Here's a site that will give you 100 little known facts about WWI. For example, when the war first started the soldiers were only wearing leather helmets which did nothing to protect their heads, the youngest soldier to join was only eight years old, and the first gas masks were just rags soaked in urine that could neutralize chlorine gas!
https://www.thefactsite.com/world-war-i-facts/
On another site I learned that it was English author H. G. Wells who was the first to call WWI "The War to End All Wars" when it began.
There are parallel universes where the bessler wheel was never lost, in one of them parallel worlds Bessler is regarded as a fool for having given away the secret to his mechanism in 1721 without payment, even in the twenty first century there he is regarded as one of the most foolish men who ever lived. Yet they have the secret and all the technologies that came from the Bessler wheel and yet do no appreciate all they have.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the secret of Bessler wheels is discovered on every inhabited planet in every galaxy about once every thousand years. 99% of the time it is lost for some reason and just becomes part of folklore and myth as happened in the last millennium on our Earth. 1% of the time it is actually revealed.
DeleteOf those cases maybe 99% of the time it is dismissed as a nice little scientific curiosity and toy, but nothing more. Kids play with little models of the wheels and executive keep them on their desks to amuse themselves between meetings and phone calls. But, in 1% of those 1% of cases where it is revealed something actually important comes from it. It leads to a new technology of self-moving machines that eventually power their entire civilization with unlimited, pollutionless, free energy. it's so simple and useful that everyone wonders why it took so long for them to find it!
But a new millennium has started on Earth now and it's time for we humans to find the secret!
If only I knew how to open up a portal , then I could go to one of the alternative universes to see how the bessler wheel works in one of them.
DeleteJust sit back and let "Mr. Know It All" explain to you why overbalanced pm wheels are impossible. Notice that he includes the drawing of the Kassel wheel among the collection of useless machines in this video at time 1:58!
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/HLRusHYWzW4
Good thing John will be revealing all in about two weeks time to completely demolish this anti-Bessler pm wheel propaganda!
It’s more than two weeks until the end of this year!
ReplyDeleteJC
Energy can be created from nothing.
ReplyDeleteYour post was a fantastic blend of information and entertainment. Thanks!
ReplyDelete