A blog about Johann Bessler and the Orffyreus Code and my efforts to decipher it. I'll comment on things connected with it and anything I think might be of interest to anyone else.
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Friday, 26 September 2025
Latest News about Bessler’s Wheel Reconstruction.
My version of Johann Bessler’s perpetual motion machine, his “wheel” as many people refer to it, proceeds at a snail’s pace, seemingly! But in fact it still proceeds. The main problem, apart from my procrastination, is constantly having to revise the five completed mechanisms. Yes I’m confident that there has to be five mechanisms.
I’ve said before that the mechanisms needed to be rearranged in order to stop them interacting with each other, or more often sticking during their action. There is a small amount of lateral motion which causes two pieces to bump into each other. I’ve tried bending the levers a small amount to force them away from their nearest part but that is not effective. But this lateral motion can be reduced by tightening the locking or stiff nuts holding the parts together. But tightening them reduces the ease with which they rotate about their pivots. However, including thin, rigid but wider washers has improved things.
To explain how and why this happens is difficult to do without picture, but at this point so close to the finish, I’m unwilling to use a picture, at least not until either I’ve finished or run out of options. One way to imagine it is to think of each of the assembled mechanisms as being in two or three layers, sometimes one layer operating above or below another. What I’ve been doing is swapping some layers so that, for instance the top layer has been placed below the others and this seems to have improved things.
So once again I am back at my previous point, and I have to install the ten pulleys or screw eyes, to feed the cord through so that as one weighted lever falls it lifts the another fallen weighted lever. All cords are under tension which is a vital feature to provide continuous motion.
JC
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It's not that unlikely. In the 1870s, two inventors, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, both independently designed devices that c...
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I often receive emails telling me that this person or that person has decoded clues, knows how the wheel works, or wants to share what the...
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On 6th June, 1712, in Germany, Johann Bessler (also known by his pseudonym, Orffyreus) announced that after many years of failure, he had s...
Are you using springs to cause that tension? Or is the tension caused by the weights under the force of gravity?
ReplyDeleteSounds like that "z axis wobble" effect is getting in the way again. Maybe the major problem in your version of the B wheel is that you are only using one disc with tightly spaced, thin, flat levers that have to swing past each other and that was not how B did it. His design used a cylindrical drum formed from two parallel discs that were actually open wooden frames that had the levers swinging around steel pivot pins that were mounted between the ribs of the frames. His levers were not "flat" like yours but wide and made from two pieces that held a lead cylinder weight between their ends. That virtually eliminated any z axis wobble. Also none of his levers passed any parts of an adjacent lever so no chance of a collision between two levers was possible.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote "The main problem, apart from my procrastination, is constantly having to revise the five completed mechanisms."
Be grateful you don't have eight levers to deal with because then you'd be doing 8/5 = 1.6 or 60% more work! I think your "procrastination" is really just fear of failure (I know the feeling well!). The longer you delay completing and testing a construction, the longer you put can off having to face that you still do not have B's design despite all of the clues you are convinced that you've found. During the delay you can continue to happily believe that you've finally solved it all and will surely soon prove it to the world.
Trying to make sense of the clues B left us is like trying to figure out the next combination of numbers that will be drawn in some lottery. One can spend hours studying all of the past numbers drawn in the lottery and be 100% convinced that he can accurately predict the results of the next drawing. He then runs out and buys a bunch of tickets and begins to fantasize about how all of the prize money will change his and his loved ones lives. Sadly, after the drawing he discovers that he only has, at most, one or two numbers on a few of the tickets he purchased, but no prize. A depressing feeling sets in identical to that of millions of other players who put zero effort into predicting the numbers and just let some lottery machine randomly pick them.
I have no doubt that B did hide his secret pm design in his writings... particularly his drawings. But finding it will require a truly Herculean amount of work. In any century there might only be one or two "Hercules" that could do it and, most likely, they'll be occupied with some other pursuit. Maybe, as in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, B's secret isn't destined to be found in this century. If so, then none of us will be around to see it when it is finally rediscovered...