A Brief Reminder About Bessler’s Machinen Tractate - The Toys Page.

I think most of us are familiar with Bessler’s Maschinen Tractate (MT) and in particular the ‘Toys’ page and its curious numbering.  At the foot of the page the numbers 138, 139,140 and 141.   This totals 558. The 55 seems a popular number for Bessler, but what of the 8?  Well the three numbers in 558 total 18 and that is the basic number in the pentagram, all the angles are multiples of 18.  So that might be his intention., but later we’ll see further information about this suggestion.

MT 137 comes just before the toys page, as it should, but before that is MT 136 which contains a mechanical construction and is the last figure containing any such thing.  MT137 shows a duodecagram, which is easily identified as circles of fifths, a well-known term used in musical theory. It is believed to point to the importance of the number 5. It also reveals the reason for the choice of number MT137.

Below is the image MT137, with the number 5 linked to 12.  

On a clock face the time at 5 o’clock looks like the image below.

The angles between the hands is shown in the picture below.

Thus we see the reason for numbering MT137 as he did.  

We can also see that he also embeds the golden ratio or mean as described by Fibonacci and Plato, in the picture below. This version comes from Euclid, 300BC.

To inscribe an equilateral and equiangular pentagon in a given circle….”

It seems as though Bessler intended there to be 141 images but having hidden or destroyed many of them that  revealed the secret of his machine he was attempting to fill in the gap between his last image of a mechanical construction, MT136, and the Toys page image to total 141.  But there was more to this than meets the eye. What  other reasons might there be for choosing to accentuate the number141 ?  Why else load the last image (the “Toys” page) and add four numbers to the bottom of the page?

The only factors of 141 are 3 and 47, and I’ve shown how Bessler embedded Euclid’s 47 th proposition describing how to construct a pentagram.  So was this yet another hint.

See the image below, of the Toys page.

The items are lettered ABCDE, but C and D appear twice.  To add to the confusion there is a plainly written 5, which might match the five lettered images but doesn’t seem to as there is rough drawing of a spinning top, lacking its string pull.  Confusing?

Splitting the drawings into five parts reveals some information.  In each division in 'A', you can see, drawn vertically, two uprights surmounted by a single one.. They bear a striking resemblance to the figures labelled 'C' and 'D', which are shown horizontally.  But why two 'C' and 'D's?  I think only one hammer is needed in 'C' plus the parallel rods.  The same in 'D' but the hammer used is rotated around the other way to point outwards or to the left, because of the spirals and it also lacks arms.

So for me ‘C’ is an active part at the same time ‘D’ is passive.  ‘A’ shows ‘C’ figures connected by a single rope or cord when ‘C’ falls it pulls ‘D’ up.

The item marked 'E' is the storks-bill, lazy tongs, scissor jacks or whatever you prefer to call them.  Item '5' is a spinning top, just in case no one makes the connection that this is all about a rotating device.  Without its cord or string it can’t work, just the same the other items on the Toys page. Maybe he’s suggesting the missing string, is present in Item ‘A’?

Item ‘B’ in my opinion represents the storks bill looked at from above with the alternate blobs showing the pins holding the storks bill together.  Looking along the drawing the red lines connect two of the outer pins and two inner ones plus one more for the weight.

The top end of item ‘A’ shows the weight attached to the end of a lever.  It shows two positions; one when the storks bill is closed and shortened;  the other with the storks bill extended.

JC

Don’t Just Simulate, You’ve got to Fabricate.!

 

Looking back I see I wrote something along the lines of this post back in 2009, 2012, 2019 and 2022!  Why am I so hooked on making working models, after all a working model can be simmed and will be if one ever materialises? 

But a suggestion on the Bessler wheel forum yesterday prompted me to re-examine my model and I saw a simple but crucial error that I  might have missed on a sim.

Anthony (a newbie) has this signature “it’s not where you see the weights on the wheel that matters, its where the wheel (FEELS) the weights thats important”.  Now that is a fact I learned so long ago that I almost forgot how important it is.

Imagine you place pendulum on a wheel with its pivot just below the axle, so the weight hangs downwards.  If you rotate the wheel a few degrees clockwise, the pendulum rotates anti-clockwise relative to the wheel.  The pivot bears the weight of the pendulum and as long as the pendulum moves relative to the wheel, the weight is pulling down on the pivot.

But if you place a stop in the path of the pendulum forcing it to stop and remain motionless, the weight is no longer felt on the pivot, but rather where the weight actually is, resting against the stop. 

As soon as the pendulum is free to move again the weight is again felt at the pivot.

The error I found was a simple mistake. A supporting rod I had fitted into the mechanism was too short,  meaning the part it was supporting did not have its pivot close enough to the axle to gain a big enough advantage?  Unless you keep the fact mentioned in Antony’s signature in mind you might not even realise you’ve overlooked it.  Like I did!  

Actually I didn’t forget about it, but I was so intent on correcting what I saw as an unnecessarily long lever in a drawing, I  shortened it too much.

JC

Did Bessler’s Perpetual Motion Machine Arrive Before ItsTime?

There has been some discussion about the potential power available from Bessler’s wheel.  Comparisons have been made between the Merseburg wheel and the Kassel wheel.  The two wheels were of a similar diameter but the Kassel wheel was 18 inches thick compared with the Merseburg wheel’s 12 inches.  The Kassel wheel, which turned more slowly than its predecessor, the Merseburg wheel, was designed to complete a long endurance test, of over one month of continuous rotation, which it easily achieved.  Clearly a slower speed of rotation would withstand wear and tear to a greater degree than a faster rotation.  The design had to be modified to achieve the slower rotation speed but the machine was still able to lift similar weights to previous machines and I suggest the extra thickness of the wheel satisfied this need.

Bessler wrote that he could make wheels of greater or smaller size and with various speeds.  He went on to suggest that the useful output of the machine could be multiplied by increasing the size of the interior workings, or by making wheels of up to 20 ells in diameter, about 37 feet! In 1700, John Rowley built a tidal wheel to pump water from the Thames to the Royal family at Windsor which measured 24 foot long by 12 foot high, so Bessler’s estimate was quite possible.  An alternative number of identical wheels could be mounted on a single axle thus multiplying the power of the resulting assembly many times.

These suggestions make good sense, so deriding the potential power possible from Bessler’s wheel without considering how one might increase the output and versatility of this remarkable invention seems like “throwing the baby out with the bath water”, an old German proverb.

Bessler’s suggestion that his wheel could help pump water from water flooded mines was never developed due to the Newcomen steam engine, but increasing the power of his wheel was never examined due to the distrust built up by the maid’s false accusations.

This does raise the question, what could have his perpetual motion machine be used for?  He suggested mills, and irrigation but satisfactory alternatives were in daily use and there was little call for his invention to be brought in to test the market.  Of course electricity generation would have provided an excellent use for his machine, but he was about 300 years too early! But not now - the time is right, with global warming, pollution from fossil fuels, lack of affordable, low tech ways of generating  electricity Bessler’s wheel is needed today.

JC

Johann Bessler’s Coded Secret Information is Ignored.

I expect everyone knows I believe Bessler’s wheel had five mechanisms.  Before you move on and dismiss what I’m going to write, just hang on for a moment.  I’m satisfied with my current and long held belief for excellent reasons, the majority of which you don’t know.

Imagine you are Bessler and you have this amazing secret which you believe is worth a fortune, but you can’t tell anyone anything about it, because you want to sell it first.  You decide that you are going to publish details of the secret but hidden in such a way that no one will ever find out unless you reveal the way to decipher it.  You believe that there are three possible outcomes.

Firstly you sell the machine and it’s secret and you decipher all the ciphers and publish the coded information and the world will gradually realise how exceedingly clever you have been.

Secondly, you never find a buyer and you die with the secret intact.  But you have sold many copies of your books.  You have inserted various comments that the books contain secret information about the Perpetual Motion machine and a clever person can study the books and eventually decipher the clues and discover the secret.

Lastly, someone else discovers the same solution and publishes it.  You prove your priority by demonstrating the clues and codes published in your three books containing all the information, from years before.

It wasn’t just the money he wanted, Johann Bessler sought recognition, which is why he went to so much trouble encoding information in various ways, adding secondary codes for confirmation in many places.  He stated that he would rather die without having sold his secret, than just give it away.

To continue imagining you are seeing things as if you were Bessler; before you even go public with your invention, you have planned everything.  First you adopt a pseudonym, but it’s not just an assumed name, it’s a clever contrivance, ostensibly to disguise your real name, but actually since everyone knows your real name, it appears to be a stage name.  Simple codes were in popular use at the time, and it was very obvious that Bessler chose an easily deciphered code name, using a well known code such as the Caesar shift, to call himself Orffyreus.

Why?  Because the use of a simple code in his assumed name, plus the few words of encouragement to readers of his books to search for the encoded secret, was intended to make people like myself and others, search for the coded information and decipher it. Exactly what we have been trying to do for many years.

At the end of the day, we know that Bessler invented a way to obtain continuous rotation enabled by the force of gravity.  We know he left secret information which was designed to show us how his machine worked.  Why on earth would we ignore this wealth of clues and codes and hints and struggle onwards dismissing this treasure trove of information?

I’ll post some of the clues I’ve uncovered and deciphered in another post, most of which I haven’t shared before.

JC