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
