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.
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