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

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