The Grear Craftsman Passage.

 

In 2017 I posted this interpretation of the “great craftsman passage.  Bessler wrote,j

Note that within the quote he mentions that there are five weights, one plus four, and each one is equal to one pound.  Secondly, one pound falls a quarter.  How do we define what he meant by a quarter? In this case he was referring to a clock - something he also included in the first drawings in both Grundlicher Bericht and Das Triumphirende - and a quarter of an hour or fifteen minutes covers 90 degrees.  But how could this single right angle fall cause “ four pounds to shoot upwards four quarters”? 

This is an abbreviation of my original post. We saw in the first part that the word ‘quarter', referred to, not just 90 degrees but also to a clock.  In the second part the word ‘quarter' also refers to a clock but this time he has used the words ‘four quarters’. ‘Four quarter’s equals ‘one whole hour’.  Each hour on a clock is divided into 30 degrees, so the words ‘four quarters’ meaning ‘one hour’ as used here equals thirty degrees.  To paraphrase Bessler’s words, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls 90 degrees, causes each of the other four pounds to shoot upwards 30 degrees.”  

Fortunately Bessler provided more information about this clue. His second image in DT is shown below.

In the next picture notice the pentagram which joins the two pictures, also note the horizontal bar on the pendulum is exactly in line with the extended chord from the pentagram.

In the picture below notice besides the pentagram there is also another feature of all the illustrations in DT - his use of the numbering the parts. This time he only uses the numbers from 1 to 10, but added together they total 55 - there’s definitely a theme here! - and when all the numbers in the right hand picture are added together they also total 55.

In the illustration below, I have filled in the pentagram in red. Originally the two drawings were on adjacent but separate pages. In the crease of the binding there were two rows of black and white lines allowing one to push together the two pages to make a perfect join at their two black borders as in the illustration.

The red line extends the upper right side chord of a pentagram in the left hand drawing, to coincide with the centre of the right circle. The triangle has a bottom angle of 30 degrees, and an upper right angle of 72 degrees and the remaining one, 78 degrees, to complete the triangle.  In a pentagram that triangle has two 72 degree angles and one 36 degree but in this case the small bottom angle measures 30 degrees so the upper right one is 72 degrees which means the remaining one has to be 78 degrees.

Notice that in the the left picture the wheel contains horizontal hatchings and outside of the wheel they are vertical.  In the right picture the hatch marks are vertical and there are none outside the wheel.  The left picture is cut off on the right side. It looks as though we are meant to slide the right one over to the left, above the left one.

The elliptical or ovoid shape on the bottom of the triangle is designed to tell us to rotate the whole pendulum around it.  I realised this was necessary because of the three lines coming out of it seemed to suggest this as a possibility. and because we know the 30 degrees is the size of the lift required in Bessler’s connectedness principle.

In the above illustration I have copied across the large triangular pendulum and tilted it so that the centre of the three verticals coming out of the ovoid are located on the centre of the left side wheel and aligned with the hatching lines  The two weights identified with red circles fit precisely on the rope, showing the 30 degree lift. The blue lines demonstrate the position if we ignore red circled weights, which I think shows that they shouldn’t be ignored.  

I only moved the pendulum because I didn’t need to move the actual right hand wheel. But the right wheel rotated 90 degrees would align the two sets of hatch marks.

This picture shows graphically the desired lift of 30 degrees to match the craftsman text.

NB.  Subsequent to this post I found a second or corrective interpretation connected with the craftman passage. Instead of a fall of 90 degrees I propose a fall of just 45 degrees.

On a clock face, if the weighted pendulum fell from the twelve o’clock point to the six o’clock point, his maximum fall would be 180 degrees.  A quarter of 180 degrees is only 45 degrees, so to paraphrase Bessler’s words as he might have intended them to mean, “  “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls a 45 degrees causes each of four pounds to shoot upwards 30 degrees.”

A more likely scenario?

JC