Johann Bessler’s Amazing Gravity Enabled Non-Stop Wheel.

Many people who are aware of the story about Johann Bessler and his extraordinary Perpetual Motion machine are familiar with his pseudonym, Orffyreus and how he arrived at the name.  But why did he decide to use a pseudonym?  What was his purpose in using one when everyone knew his real name?  The reason is simple once you know.

When he had worked out how to build a gravity-enabled perpetual motion machine he began construction and built his first working model.  He hoped to sell the secret to a rich prince for a lot of money, but there was a real problem to overcome first.  He had found the secret to making this device but realised the difficulty he was going to encounter in substantiating his claims without revealing the secret of its construction. How was he to convince would-be purchasers of his machine that it was genuine?  If he allowed anyone to see the interior and understand how it worked, what was to stop them just walking away and making their own version of his mechanical marvel?

Word about his machine quickly spread and people came to study it and examine the external features but no one was allowed to view the interior.  The inventor moved from town to town gradually moving closer to the busier places and as his fame grew people of high rank came to examine the device.

Gottfried Leibniz, the famous scientist, came to see the wheel on two occasions spending a couple of hours on each occasion and although he dismissed Perpetual Motion as a legitimate possibility he recognised that Bessler’s wheel had something of value about it and recommended that it should not be ignored for fear of losing it.

He and Bessler discussed the problem of proving its legitimacy without revealing the interior workings of the wheel.  Leibniz suggested that it would be helpful if he could find a patron who had the kind of secure facilities to allow Bessler to exhibit his machine for official examinations and tests.  It would also help if this patron had a reputation for absolute honesty.

They discussed a number of features Bessler could include which would be very difficult to achieve if the machine was a fake.  These were present at all the demonstrations.  They included two separate fixtures to which the wheel was attached, to allow the examiners to thoroughly examine all external aspects of the wheel, moving it from one set to the other as often as was requested.  An Archimedes pump was attached to the wheel axle and a 70 pound weight was shown being lifted several feet up and down the castle walls. A 54 day test was carried out under lock and key and 24 hour guard to prove no winding up was necessary.

These actions were carried out on several occasions during Bessler’s residency at Hesse Kassel for around ten years.  No sign of fraud was ever found and it seems that there were approaches made to purchase the device.  But they failed due to the inventor’s insistence that the money be paid in full before the purchaser could ascertain to his own satisfaction that the machine was genuine. This, despite the fact that Bessler swore on oath that if he was found to have cheated he should have his head chopped off!  Not an unlikely outcome in those days.

Johann Bessler was driven by a determination to be acknowledged as the original inventor of the gravity-enabled perpetual motion machine, but from the very beginning he seems to have realised that his chief difficulty lay in proving that he was not cheating.  This seeming impasse convinced him to encode the information required to understand and build a replica of his machine and embed the information in a book he planned to publish.  Ideally he wished to sell the secret and the machine for a large sum of money but in order to do that he had ensure that the strict terms of the purchase were clear, above board and adhered to.  

Given the above it’s not too surprising that he wrote that he’d rather die than give away the secret for free. But that plan might have had to modified later in life, but we will never know because he died early aged just 64, when he fell from the top of windmill he was building for the local town council of Fürstenberg not far from his home in Karlshafen. So all we know is that the encoded information lies embedded within the three books he eventually published.

He left strong hints that the information was there and could be found and understood if people searched for it. I have written about this on my previous blogs and provided links to my web sites in which I describe many of codes and ciphers I have found and deciphered. They can be found in the lower end of the panel on the right of this blog.

Over the years I have gathered a lot of information about the wheel and how it worked.  But even given the extraordinary number of clues in both text and drawing, it has been an almost impossible task to draw together all of the clues and pieces of deciphered text.  I think I have got it now and even after all this time, my whole life, I’m not one hundred per cent certain that I’ve got it right, but one thing I do know.  I understand the principle completely and it works.

The following link will take you to the books, including my own biography as well as all Bessler’s publications which each contain a full English translation.

https://johncollinsnews.blogspot.com/p/johann-besslers-books-and-biography.html

JC

Additional Imagery in Support Bessler’s Wheel.

There are a number of images taken from Johann Bessler’s books which appear to support my previous post on Bessler’s Wheel Revealed.  I shall occasionally post some here.

One of the things that caught my attention in my physical build is the appearance of the mechanism reminding me of a peacocks tail. It’s just one mechanism but it does bring that image to mind.  I’ll post a picture of one of the mechanisms which demonstrates that.

The second thing is the clues which I know many people dismiss, but Bessler must have thought it worthwhile to include them, and he had a purpose in doing so. Here is an example of one of them.

JEEB, (his initials), J is the 10th letter, two letters E, which are the 5th letter. He added the J and one of the Es to his forename when he succeeded in building his first PM wheel. 

JEEB using the Caesar shift becomes WRRO. R is the 18th letter. W 23rd letter which doesn’t seem important but it might appear to be there for the following reason, W is composed of two Roman numerals, V meaning 5.

Apart from that the letter ‘J’ seems almost superfluous.  He gave us two ‘E’s which gives is 5 and 18, and the pentagram, why the letter ‘J’.

He often, (dozens of times) hand wrote the letter W as shown below as two Roman numerals linked together, and you can see it twice in the accompanying passage. Why did he want to show them linked?

The last picture I included include the ‘W’ in the scissors and although it may not look very obvious from my drawing it is very clear in my physical build.

 I always thought it unnecessary to add the ‘J’ and therefore the ‘W’ when he had already informed us of the importance of the two ‘E’s, but the ‘W’ as shown in the printed extract shown above mimics the W in my drawing. Notice how the centre of the ‘W’ has crossed lines as in the drawing.

Bessler used any opportunity to put a veiled reference to these numbers. I should also point out that the 2G’s, refers to his enemy in chief Andreas Gärtner. The 2 W’s refers to another enemy, Christian Wagner, the two B’s refer to the third enemy, Johann Gottfried Borlach.

NB - I only noticed the presence of the ‘W’ in my last picture a couple of weeks ago but I’m certain that it is one of the reasons he included the letter ‘J’ in his initials.

JC

Sharing Info MT 138, 139, 140 and 141- AKA — The TOYS Page

This post contains some of my ideas about where and how Bessler intended to reveal the workings of his perpetual motion device, or what is generally referred to as Bessler’s Wheel.  Without a working model this is speculation, but I believe it is based on some sound interpretation of the many clues and hints he scattered throughout his documents.

 I’ve written several blogs about the ‘Toys’ page so this is my latest and best attempt to explain all of it.

The figure below is from the original Maschinen Tractate, which is a name I coined for it because I originally thought that Bessler was referring to this collection of drawings in one of his letters but I think now he was talking about another project.

Underneath this original picture is the same figure cleaned up which is the one I’ll write about and explain what I believe is the true meaning of all the separate figures.

Notice first that items A and B can be split into five equal parts.  This signifies that there are five mechanisms.  Notice each figure in A looks similar to the two items C and D, this is to provide a hint that their actions very roughly mimic the actions of the actual mechanisms.  Each part of A is linked to the next part with a length of rope.

Items C and D are each labelled twice.  Both sets of figures show two figures working in pairs, which agrees with a statement to that effect by Bessler.  The two C’s have arms but the two D’s don’t. The two C’s show two of the figures working in pairs before they have acted; the two D’s shows the same two figures after they have acted. This implies that C did the work so was active but D was acted upon and was passive.  C lifted it’s paired mechanism and thus D was lifted. Item D has spirals which indicate that the figure is at a different angle to C, because if, for instance, C operates at the six o’clock radius the D is lifted from a different point on the edge of the circle.

It’s worth pointing out that he drew one of each mechanism but then added two D’s and two C’s to stress that the two figures were the same mechanisms working in pairs, but at different points in the rotation of the wheel.

Item B is an interesting one and I only understood why it was drawn in this way a few months ago. The answer lies partly in item E.  You can see in B that it consists of five straight vertical lines with one dot alternately on each side or, if you ignore the five separating lines, it’s a straight vertical line with those dots on alternate sides.

I’ll return to B in a moment, first let us examine item E. The items on the page are numbered 1 to 5, yet there are six, if you count the hand drawn spinning top.  This looks like a late addition to me which might explain why he wrote 5. next to his scribble note. But as someone pointed out to me many years ago, the number 5. with its clearly drawn full stop or period indicates not five items, but the fifth item - the letter E.  The scissor mechanism or storks bill.

Remember Bessler’s frequent use of alphanumerics, in this case his scribbled note in the Toys page, “5. Children's game in which there is something extraordinary for anyone who knows how to apply the game in a different way”, applies in particular to the scissor mechanism labelled E.

Now in another drawing which I’ll discuss in a later share, it indicates

that the scissor mechanism should be applied in a different way which looks like this one:-

In the above picture I have extracted items B and E because B shows which part of E you need to use. Notice the same dots are there in E but in B half of them have been removed leaving a single line. This shows the alternate swivel pins or joints holding the short lengths of metal at each end together. The middle of each piece of metal shows a pivot which allows it to rotate. If the figure B is accurate, and I’m sure it is, then there is one of these mechanisms in each fifth segment.

This is similar to the picture below which shows a simple mechanism used widely in organ building in Bessler’s time.  

Also remember Bessler’s comment in AP, “ A crab crawls from side to side. It is sound, for it is designed thus.”   This comment is a hint that this mechanism will work best in a horizontal position where there is no lifting required just side to side action.

The two short lines at the top end of the original version of B will be explained later but they indicate two positions of a short lever attached to the end of the zigzag line.

That’s all for now. More later.

JC

Spanish break.

Because I'm away to Spain for some R & R, and may have limited access to the internet I probably won't post anything on my blog for a couple of weeks. I have a plan written up for my return as I have worked out precisely what needs to be altered in the design of the mechanisms, but I shall mull over the design during my break. With luck I shall be back on course for reconstructing Bessler's wheel on my return.

It surprises me that, given everything I know about the mechanism, I should have made such a simple error as not ensuring that the mechanism operated at the correct time in the rotation of the wheel. I wonder how many other trials by other would-be inventors failed because of something similar, something that maybe went through unnoticed. How many near-misses have their been?

Lastly, thank you for the many messages of encouragement. I had no idea so many people were following this blog.

"Una cerveza, por favor!" - Make that "Una grande cerveza, por favor!" Just practising you know ;-)

Sadly for us Brits, we seem to be a country that is fast developing a binge-drinking culture with the predictable side affects of under age drinking. In Spain you see hardly any drunks and yet they appear to indulge for several hours a day. It must be the drip drip approach that allows them to maintain their dignity despite being several sheets to the wind. In the UK we seem to hit the ground running and attempt to get as many jars of the strongest nectar available down our necks in the shortest possible time - with predictable results.

What's that saying? Oh yes - Alcohol, the cause of, and the solution to all of life's problems.

See you when I get back.

Ciao.

JC