Someone emailed me to ask me why I didn’t visit the Besslerwheel forum any more and why was my blog silent about my work?
Well I visit the forum everyday but find that I have little reason to comment. I have rarely come across anything that hasn’t been commented on countless times in the past and the authors seem to be very few in number these days, although they sometimes have excellent discussions with interesting topics.
There is a lot of commentary on the English translations done for me by my friend Mike Senior, not so much finding fault as much as trying to squeeze extra information from the translations using modern translators. I have no objection to this, it might be helpful, but I recall Mike’s advice to me when he agreed to translate everything.
The text was written 300 years ago in a foreign language by a man who was born into a peasant family. No criticism intended, but his culture would have used colloquialisms, slang, numerous idioms and of course common terminology - unknown to us. Nuances in meaning vary in all languages including German and English. So using Mike’s translations provided in a form which he believed gives the most likely meaning is probably as near as we can get to Bessler’s thoughts. Not that Mike didn’t make mistakes , I’m sure he did, but in my opinion it’s still the best we have. Modern translators use modern German as their baseline - I doubt they could use the German of Bessler’s day to get modern English - even the English of the 1700s differs markably to today’s language.
Visit this website for numerous examples of how English word meanings have changed or even reversed their meanings. It’s called semantics and it is common to all languages.
The other question about this blog - why is it so silent? Good question, I hoped too have some real answers relatively quickly.
Time passes at an ever increasing speed and my intention was to have one final go at building a working model of Bessler’s wheel, before my 79th birthday, but it seems to have been blown off course by the winds of time. I thought that with all the rain we’ve been having, I could work on Bessler's wheel in my garage/workshop secure in the knowledge that working outside on my wife’s exterior plans was out of the question. Oops, I had forgotten a list of interior jobs I had promised to deal with asap. Anyway to quote from “Gone with the Wind”, the last line of the book reads, “tomorrow is another day”. So tomorrow has come…..a bit. Now I’m able to spend, at least some time on the wheel, I believe there are no more excuses left for me but to finish this job once and for all!
So from now on I’ll be working on it, but continuing to fulfil my other commitments, by working round them, hopefully. I’ll have a better idea of a finishing date after a few days.
Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” I guess the same applies to me/us, but my confidence in this design is high and even if it doesn’t work, I will share it here in case anyone’s interested. I do think it is the same as Bessler’s but rather than try to explain it I’ll simply post photos and videos of it once it’s ready. This is not a new design for me because I’ve been studying it for almost a year, but there have been minor alterations and adjustments to make, not to mention the old pieces of previous mechanisms I’m using up which require extensive alterations.
But perhaps these are just excuses for my procrastination? Maybe I can always find other things to do, which I convince myself, are more important, more urgent ….and easier! Or as someone suggested, the reason for the delay is apparently, that I fear the outcome which will end in another failure. That at least is not true, I always anticipate success even though, like Thomas Edison, I’ve found 10,00O, ways of making a stationary wheel. I’m just getting older and it takes more of an effort to keep working, but I’m definitely going to finish this one as soon as I can.
JC
