The Bessler - Orffyreus Perpetual Motion Machine.

Johann Bessler, aka Orffyreus, exhibited a perpetual motion machine in 1712. Of course it wasn’t a perpetual motion machine (PM for Perpetual Motion) in the sense that most people think of them.   For a start it wasn’t isolated from any form of external energy, which is a strict requirement for such a theoretical device. It used weights which means it was enabled by gravity.

A waterwheel is driven by the flow of a river, the combustion engine by igniting petrol.  These two examples could just as easily be described as PM machines.  They are not isolated from any external source of energy, because the river flows down hill because gravity makes it.  It could in theory run continuously as long as the river flows thanks to gravity. The combustion engine will run continuously as long as it has fuel in its tank.

If the energy source is being maintained at a sufficient level, the machine will stay in motion like the so-called PM machine. But surely gravity isn’t an energy source?  No, but without it the water wheel won’t flow.

So Bessler’s wheel wasn’t a PM machine because it wasn’t isolated from external sources of energy.  But this is where confusion lies.  It was what people believed it to be, namely a PM machine.  But once people examined  the idea and defined it more precisely, they realised that many machines have external sources of  energy and they couldn’t all be PMs, so the idea was introduced, that a PM must be isolated from all external sources of energy including gravity.

The idea that a PM had to be isolated from all external stimuli and yet retain motion once started - and do work is utterly ridiculous.  No wonder PM is believed to be impossible.  Continuous motion can only happen if it can tap an external energy source.

Like every other would-be discoverer of the secret of PM, Bessler’s wheel used a number of weights in its interior, this is a well established fact.  This clearly implies that gravity had a role to play - the design of the machine required the movement of a number of weights configured in a certain way to produce continuous rotation. Thus we can say that his wheels were gravity-enabled.

But we have been taught that the force of gravity is not a source of energy.  This is actually true, but without its force the river wouldn’t flow.  Without its force the weights in Bessler's wheel wouldn’t fall.  But the water has to move from higher ground to lower in order to run and turn the water wheel - and the weights have to fall; both events are driven to move by gravity.  In doing this gravity does work, expends energy.   But in both cases there has be an intermediate medium.  Water or the weights.  Without them no motion is enabled by gravity.

So when we say Bessler’s wheel is enabled by gravity, even though gravity is not a source of energy, it is a vital ingredient.  The energy for the work being done is generated by the fall of the weights, the intermediary between gravity and the wheel. This process seems to be ignored even by many who study this field, they are still battling with the idea that as gravity is not an energy source it can’t be labelled such.  But it is just the same as any system which relies on the presence of gravity to provide input at its most basic level….mass in motion.

The main argument against this point of view is well known and simple. When a single weight falls, it derives kinetic energy from the motion of its fall.  When a force moves an object of mass it does work.  In this case the force doing the work is gravity.  After the work is done the energy has been transferred to the object of mass.  

Bessler’s wheel was driven by weighted levers, causing the machine to rotate.  We know that a weighted lever beginning its fall from the twelve o’clock position in a clock face and being allowed to fall freely will only get to the six o’clock position before it has to begin to climb against the force of gravity to get back to its starting point at twelve o’clock position.

Even if we could remove all possible friction, the return point would only just reach the twelve o’clock point.  But we need the device to do work, not just overcome friction.  Theoretically thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people have studied this problem and tried to resolve it - but all failed except Johann Bessler.  Instinctively those many, many people knew that there was a solution to this problem, and there is.  Bessler found it and I believe I have found it.  I’ve been working on a PoP wheel, (Proof of Principle) and I hope to have finished by early next year.  It won’t be an attractive model, just a crude assembly of previously used parts, but one that proves the design.

Click on the link below for all information about my published books.  There is my own biography about Bessler which includes all documents by or about Johann Bessler, plus you can obtain digital copies of all of his publications each with a full English translation.

https://johncollinsnews.blogspot.com/p/johann-besslers-books-and-biography.html

JC

Johann Bessler’s (aka Orffyreus’) Maschinen Tractate.l

The publication mentioned in the title of this post, Maschinen Tractate, was never published by Bessler but was found in his possessions after his death. I have producedca digital copy and a printed version available from the side panel of this post. It includes an English translation of Bessler’s handwritten notes, which were difficult to read, but still useful.

Bessler’s Maschinen Tractate (MT) consisted of 141 illustrations designed to lead one to the discovery of Bessler’s Perpetual Motion machine. Originally intended to provide material for his planned school for apprentices, it unfortunately lacks the final illustration depicting the solution. I called the final page, ‘The Toys Page’, because it includes a brief reference to ‘children’s games’. This final page has the numbers 138, 139, 140 and 141 added to the bottom left of the picture. The page immediately before the toys page was numbered MT137, which was the logical number for the preceding page.

There is a possible explanation for the inclusion of those numbers. Firstly 141 is only divisible by 3 and 47. Euclid’s 47th proposition shows how to construct a pentagram and I’ve shown that most his construction method can be seen in his two pictures of his Merseberg and Weissenstein wheel. 

But interestingly adding together all four numbers written at the foot of the ‘Toys’ page produces a total of 558, and 55 we know is one of Bessler’s most favourite numbers, but the 8 is not so easily explained. However adding these three numbers brings the total to 18, the key number in the pentagram. So here we have a typical Bessler move designed to make us think and seek an explanation - suggesting the pentagram again.

As I have pointed out previously MT137 contains the musical ‘circle of fifths’ diagram, a guide for musicians. It takes the form of a dodecagram, a twelve pointed star. See adjacent picture of MT137.

Some of you may be aware of the work I've published on www.theorffyreuscode.com .Three of the pages refer to the dodecagram on MT 137. I wrote that Johann David Heinichen, 1683-1729, a German musician, introduced the concept known as the ‘circles of fifths’ in 1711 (he called it Quintenzirkel). I suggested that MT 137 being similar to his quintenzirkel was designed to point to the circle of fifths, thus being another pointer to the number five.

I was drawn to this illustration, MT137 because it looked like a random addition but I knew that nothing in Bessler’s books was devoid of purpose. We know that Bessler was fascinated by the history and the relationship between numbers and letters and their hidden meanings and of course all the popular codes of the era, and it seemed to me that he had included the number quite deliberately, even if it was somewhat roughly executed. I believe that he added the Toys page later in life and replaced some of the existing pages which gave the secret of the wheel. My guess is that he also added the MT 137 at the same time.

MT 137, is the only illustration in the MT which doesn’t appear to show any mechanisms. One reason for this was, as I suggested above, to provide a hint towards the circle of fifths, but as Bessler usually included two or even three pieces of information in each of his clues I felt there could be something additional, that was invisible to me. 

I was intrigued by the possibility that the number 137 was recognised to have special properties in Bessler’s time. There are websites devoted to such things as the properties of the three main pyramids which allude to the number 137, plus the Kabbalah, numerology, Freemasons, etc. I’m inserting an interesting link about the number 137, the GOD particle.

“Leon Max Lederman is an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988. In his book, “The God Particle”, he writes:

“One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant.”

https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/hidden-message-khafre-s-pyramid-what-were-builders-trying-tell-us-008646#google_vignette

But I discovered that Bessler was hinting at the relationship between 137 and the golden angle or the golden mean, well known to the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks who called it phi, after the Greek sculptor Phideas. Phi, the golden ratio, is equal to 1.618, plus an unending succession of numbers. Plato discussed the subject at length in his Timaeus and of course there are the Leonardo Fibonacci series of numbers, and the laws of nature also dependant on the gold mean!

In geometry, the golden angle is the smaller of the two angles created by dividing the circumference of a circle according to the golden ratio, thus creating two arcs so that the ratio of the length of the smaller arc to the length of the larger is the same as the ration of the larger arc to the full circumference of the circle.

I must thank Trevor, a long time correspondent for pointing out the error in the above illustration.  360/1.618 is of course 222.5 and not 225.5.  I originally posted the illustration back in 2020, but nobody noticed then, me included. 😃

This provides two radii with angles of two particular degrees. The golden angle is 137.508. I suspect that using the number 137 for his dodecagram seemed like a good idea to the inventor, but he couldn’t name it MT 137.5, that would be too obvious. Bessler used the golden ratio routinely in his drawings and it was more commonly integrated in works of art than it is today. 

If you use two radii to divide a circle according to the golden ratio it yields sectors of approximately 137° (1.618, the golden ratio) and 222°, hence it being the numbered 137. 

To be accurate 360/1.618 = 222.5 and 360-222.5=137.5 Curiously 1/137.5 = 00727272727 etc. and 5x72=360, the basic numbers of the pentagram again.

But it is also interesting that 137.5/55 = 2.5 exactly because in his musical circle of fifths Heinichen explained that the circle of fifths gets its name from the fact that you travel across the circle from one point to another 5/12th away, or 2.5 segments away, in order to find circle of fifths. This is a way of organising pitches as a sequence of perfect fifths. 

In the above illustration the circle with its 137.5 degree angle also mimics a clock at five o’clock, which is a good pointer to the circle of fifths. But in truth with the hands showing five o’clock the angle would be 150 degrees (5x30) not 137.5. To show the angle as 137.5 with the hour hand at five, the minute hand is in fact closer to the number one on the clock, or 12.5 degrees nearer, 

Check out my web site at www.theorffyreuscode.com

JC

Update on My Bessler’s wheel.

Over the last few months I’ve received several emails and messages asking for news about my project to replicate Bessler’s wheel.  Many people in this area of research are aware of my own contribution to it but I stopped posting blogs about Bessler a few weeks ago preferring to promote my books in order to try to defray the ongoing costs of maintaining my six web sites. I intend to return to posting more details of the information I’ve recovered from Bessler’s books.  For info on my web sites see below.

http://www.free-energy.co.uk/

http://www.besslerswheel.com/

http://www.theorffyreuscode.com/

http://www.orffyreus.net/

http://www.orffyreus.org/

https://www.gravitywheel.com/

and a YouTube video I made several years ago!

https://youtu.be/5BWVKtpuzn0

___________________________________________________________________________

This is my current position concerning my efforts to build a duplicate of Johann Bessler’s perpetual motion device.  I dislike the term perpetual motion because it has such unfortunate connotations and is inaccurate - I prefer gravity-enabled continuous motion.

I know how Bessler’s wheel worked, and in fact I have known for all this year and some months last year, since I awoke one morning with the simple design open in my mind’s eye, having dreamed of it during the night.  Following the revelation I drew many pictures of it to examine the concept and immediately realised that it was correct.  In fact it was obviously the solution and I set to work designing a physical model to demonstrate it.  I decided not to publish explanatory drawings because it’s my belief that without a working model few if any will believe me and my past experience confirms this.  I think a video of an actual model working, showing the interior in motion is the best way to present a convincing explanation of the way it works.

So I’m still assembling a proof of principle model and I hope that this will help in my efforts to bring this device to the world’s attention.  In my opinion it’s a vital discovery which could offer a cheap clean alternative to the current energy sources.  You know the sources? Solar, nuclear, wind, fossil fuel, tidal and all the other multitude of expensive, wasteful, polluting methods.

So work on completing this model is made a little more difficult with my arthritic hands but not impossible.  I will continue to build and I won’t stop until I’ve proved I’m right!  I’ve never been so confident as I am now but even though I can see and understand the concept there are minor obstacles to overcome first. I know the exact concept but relative sizes of the various parts are not certain and I’m using old parts from former builds and some individual pieces maybe too small or too large but I am modifying them as I  go building them into at least one mechanism.  Then I’ll know for sure which works best.  It will be a crude model but it only has to prove the principle is  correct.

My enthusiasm to continue with this project has returned in full flood, but occasionally, there have been times when I lost some of my passion for this project to build yet another model, but even then I remained utterly convinced that Bessler told the truth. In those times I lost the energy to try yet another build without having a clear and convincing hypothesis explaining a workable concept

I know that losing some of your enthusiasm in life, losing some of the passion projects that you were once so excited about, losing your enthusiasm for your dreams - that could be disastrous. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever suffered from a lack of personal conviction that Bessler told the truth about his machine, but years of scornful dismissal can make a serious dent in your dreams and maybe you begin to think that perhaps your belief in Bessler’s perpetual motion machine was misguided or just plain wrong. Add the years of failed attempts to replicate his device and your thoughts begin to question that belief. But those years of research where I sought the truth about Bessler returned, buttressed my belief and that’s when the dream rescued me from my doubts.

So I will continue to the finish. I like to imagine the extreme delight I shall experience when I can present a working model to the world which I can prove is exactly the same as Bessler’s. How wonderful to silence all those doubters and naysayers who penned such scornful, derisory comments about me and my work.

So visit this site from time to time to check on my progress, and when I’ve finished it and it works, Bessler’s wheel will be revealed.

JC