Is Gravity An Energy Source?

I often see this framed as a question and the answer is always no.   

In scientific terms as taught for about 300 years it isn’t a source of energy.  Indeed, we’ve all been taught that gravity is not an energy source - but really?  Actually we’ve been using gravity as if it was an energy source for hundreds or even thousands of years.  From Egyptian water wheels to today’s hydroelectric generators we have used the flow of water to drive machinery.  What was needed was another intermediary, other than water, to use between the force of gravity and what ever was needed to be activated.  So a number of  weights seems a logical alternative medium to tap gravity.  But since ancient times there is no record of anyone ever having achieved this, but this hasn’t stopped people trying to solve this puzzle.  

An Indian mathematician Bhaskara,  Villard de Honnecourt, a French Master Mason and and architect,  Leonardo da Vinci, Cornelius Drebbel - and of course Johann Bessler aka Orffyreus, all attempted the impossible feat of making a working Perpetual motion machine.  All except the last one,  Orffyreus (Bessler), failed!

Bessler succeeded - and after the first one proceeded to make larger and larger ones.  He was desperate to sell his machine and gain the full acknowledgement as the inventor of the ingenious device he had invented, but he also asked for a large sum of money.  Too much for anyone but a prince or even a King to pay.  If Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, had not died on his way to view the wheel, I’m sure it would have become a familiar part of our lives.

JC

UPDATE. - How and Why I Spent 60 Years Reseaching Bessler

Many people have asked me how and why I ended up researching the life of Johann Bessler, given that he was believed to be a charlatan, a faker and what we might call a scam or con artist.  I have been told numerous times that Bessler deceived others by presenting a fraudulent offer as legitimate - and of course I was taught in school that perpetual motion machines would break the conservation of energy law.  

He offered for sale his self- proclaimed Perpetual Motion machine, for a figure of £20,000 - a sum worth more than £3.5 million today.  He didn’t just pluck this figure out of the air - it was the same sum of money offered in 1712, by the British Board of Longitude, for the first person to devise a way to establish a ship’s position at sea.  

Bessler did not intend to enter for that prize but he did think that his invention, the Perpetual Motion machine, was worth at least as much and so he set the purchase price for his machine at the same figure.

The reason I decided to find out as much as I could about Bessler and his machine was down to a small piece of information I found in a book about the inventor which initially raised a question in my mind.  

In a document dated 28th November 1727, Orffyreus' maid makes the following statement.

"The posts had been hollowed out and contained a long thin piece of iron with a barb at the bottom which was attached to the shaft journal.

Turning was carried out from Orffyreus' bedroom which was close to the machine, on a shelf behind the bed."

Strangely, it was these particular sentences, which have been quoted as one of the most vital pieces of evidence of the inventor's duplicity that eventually led me to begin my research.

I had already read a full and accurate account of the inventor and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what ever other negative evidence was produced concerning Bessler’s honesty, that of the maid quoted above was a lie. Her description of how the machine was made to rotate was, frankly, impossible.

We have so much information about all of these machines that Bessler demonstrated; the huge size of some of them, their speed, their capacity for lifting very heavy weights, and their demonstrable endurance to run without stopping for 54 days; that we can dismiss the maid’s evidence without hesitation.

In which case we are left with only the inventors demonstrations in front of numerous members of the public, including princes, councillors, university lecturers and Doctors.  But there was one other witness of impeccable integrity.  Karl the Landgrave of Hesse Kassel, was a man who was universally acknowledged to have strong moral principles who consistently demonstrated honesty and ethical behaviour . He was asked to grant his patronage and help Bessler to promote his invention by providing space in his castle.

Karl was shrewd and had good practical knowledge and the ability to make good judgements. He had invited Denis Papin to his court in Kassel in 1695 and supported his research for several years. Before he would agree to offer help of any kind to Bessler he insisted that he must be allowed to see the interior to check the inventor’s claims were genuine.  Bessler reluctantly agreed and after completing a thorough examination of the device, Karl published  a document asserting the legitimacy of the inventor’s claims.

That is briefly why I undertook this life long search. How I did it, is harder to explain.

Bessler was German, I knew no German!  How was I to find all the documents I needed and translate them into English.  It was at this point I realised this was going take a very long time, most of my life!

After several years of fragmented research I wrote as complete an account of the inventor as I could manage.  This book, “Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?”, is available - see below.

Although I didn’t know any German, I had to try to find contact addresses in Germany who might hold additional documentary evidence which I might find useful - and then try to get someone to translate my letter into German and if I was lucky enough to get a reply, get someone to translate it back into English.  Then I had to try to get any information they had, be it in England or Germany, back to me, usually as a typed letter posted to me, hopefully with photocopies of the material I sought and get it translated into English again.

There was no internet or google in those days, just the local library.  But I came to rely on these old but well established icons from an earlier day.  I wrote a letter to a local newspaper asking for help in translating 300 year old German documents.  I wasn’t expecting any responses but much to my surprise I received six offers of help.  The six quickly dwindled to two once they knew this was going to be a long term project. One of them, Michael Senior, became a lifelong friend until sadly, he passed away a few years ago.  He was a true polymath.  He was fluent in German, Latin and Greek,  he could recall speeches from ancient Greek.  Among other subjects he had degrees in botany, physics, mathematics and astrophysics.  He was a member of MENSA.  

He translated everything for me, hand-writing his translations, adding interesting notes on the text as he went.  It was mostly due to him that I was able correspond with fellow researchers in Germany.

I posted numerous letters to many German libraries posting over a period of about five years more than 150 such letters gaining additional information which I was able to include in my biography of Bessler.

That is the how and the why?  I almost forgot!  The most important part of why? Because Bessler’s machine would solve so many problems today.  Low tech; cheap to make; clean energy, requiring cheap abundant resources.  

Bessler was obsessed with maintaining the secret of the machine’s construction until he had obtained his monetary reward. We now know that he hid this secret in his self-published books and stated that he would rather die with his machine unsold than give it away.  I have found and decoded many of his clues, codes and puzzles which left for us.  The easier ones are described in some of my other websites and all five books relating to Bessler are available from this blog. The books containing German text each include a full English translation. See bottom of right panel or the top of the same panel for links to other of my sites as well how to obtain printed and digital copies of each book..

JC

Copyright ©️ 2025 John Collins

The Legend of Bessler’s Perpetual Motion Machine.

 On 6th June, 1712, in Germany, Johann Bessler (also known by his pseudonym, Orffyreus) announced that after many years of failure, he had succeeded in designing and building a perpetual motion machine. For more than fourteen years he exhibited his machine and allowed people to thoroughly examine the outside of it, but it’s internal workings were kept hidden. This was because the inventor feared that his design would be copied and someone else might obtain credit for all his years of hard work looking for the solution. He followed the advice from the famous scientist, Gottfried Leibniz, who was able to examine the device, and recommended a number of demonstrations and tests designed to prove the validity of his machine without giving away the secret of its design.

Karl the Landgrave of Hesse permitted Bessler to live, work and exhibit his machine at the prince's castle of Weissenstein. Karl was a man of unimpeachable reputation and he insisted on being allowed to verify the inventor's claims before he allowed Bessler to take up residence. This the inventor reluctantly agreed to and once he had examined the machine to his own satisfaction Karl authorised the publication of his approval of the machine. For several years Bessler was visited by numerous people of varying status, scientists, ministers and royalty. Several official examinations were carried out and each time the examiners concluded that the inventor's claims were genuine.

Over a number of years Karl aged and it was decided that after so long it was time the inventor left the castle and he was granted accommodation in the nearby town of Karlshafen. Despite the strong circumstantial evidence that his machine was genuine, Bessler failed to secure a sale and after more than thirty years he died in poverty. His death came after he fell from a windmill he had been commissioned to build. The windmill was an interesting design using a vertical axle which allowed it to benefit from winds from any directions. 

He had asked for a huge sum of money for the secret of his perpetual motion machine, £20,000 which was an amount thought only affordable by kings and princes, and although many were interested, none were prepared to agree to the terms of the deal. Bessler required that he be given the money before the buyer was allowed to view the internal workings of the machine. But those who sought to purchase the wheel, for that was the form the machine took, insisted that they see the secret mechanism before they parted with the money. Bessler feared that once the design was known the buyers could simply walk away knowing how to build his machine and he would get nothing for his trouble. 

I became curious about the legend of Bessler’s Wheel, while still in my teens, and have spent most of my life researching the life of Johann Bessler (I’m now 80). I obtained copies of all his books and had them translated into English and self-published them, in the hope that either myself or someone else might solve the secret and present it to the world in this time of pollution, global warming and increasingly limited energy resources.

Not long after I was able to read the English translations of his books, I realised that Bessler had embedded a number of clues in his books. These took the form of hints in the text, but also in a number of drawings he published and I found suggestions by the author that studying his books would reveal enough information about his wheel,to allow “someone with an acute and discerning mind, to build one”.

For some ideas about Bessler’s code why not visit my web sites at 

http://www.theorffyreuscode.com/

Take a look at my work on his “Declaration of Faith” at 

http://www.orffyreus.net/

Also please view my video at 

https://youtu.be/5BWVKtpuzn0

It gives a brief account both the legend and some more detail about some of the codes.

The problem of obtaining a fair reward for all his hard work was anticipated by Bessler and he took extraordinary measures to ensure that his secret was safe, but he encoded all the information needed to reconstruct the machine in a small number of books that he published. He implied that he was prepared to die without selling the secret and that he believed that posthumous acknowledgement was preferable to being robbed of his secret while he yet lived.


It has recently become clear that Bessler had a huge knowledge of the history of codes and adopted several completely different ones to disguise information within his publications. I have made considerable advances in deciphering his codes and I am confident that I have the complete design.


Johann Bessler published three books, and digital copies of these with English translations may be obtained from the links to the right of this blog. In addition there is a copy of his unpublished document containing some 141 drawings - and also my own account of Bessler’s life is also available from the links. It is called "Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?" 

This biography contains a wealth of information about Bessler himself, as well as many quotes by Bessler and letters to him or about him from many interested parties. It tells of his life up to and including his years with Karl the Landgrave of Hesse Kassel, and what happened to him later.

Bessler's three published books are entitled "Grundlicher Bericht", "Apologia Poetica” and "Das Triumphirende...".

I have called Bessler's collection of 141 drawings “Maschinen Tractate”, but it was originally found in the form of a number of loosely collected drawings of perpetual motion designs. Many of these have handwritten notes attached and I have published the best English translation of them that I was able to get. Bessler never published these drawings but clearly intended to use them in his planned school for apprentices.

You can order copies of the books from my website at 

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

Printed books direct from the printer can be obtained from here

https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/johncollins

Or from the top of the right side panel under the heading ‘Bessler’s Books’.

There are also links lower down on the right side panel.

These books contain the most important information available if you seek to find the solution to Bessler’s wheel.

JC