I have received two emails since Christmas berating me for using an ambiguous title for my biography of Johann Bessler. It seems that I may have given the impression that the book was about my own discovery of the secret of perpetual motion. Apparently it was thought that the book contained a description of how to build such a machine! I published this book in 1997, and I must admit that there have been previous such emails over the last few years - maybe one or two a year - and I wonder if this means that others too, have also misread my intention in entitling the book thus, but have refrained from comment.
It was my intention to provide a brief description of the book's content in the title, and in a longer description it would have read as "Did Johann Bessler discover the long-sought-after secret of perpetual motion?". To me, the inclusion of the question mark at the end of the title showed beyond doubt that I was simply asking the question, had perpetual motion, an ancient mystery, ever been solved? I explained this to the email critics but I don't think they accepted it. They seemed to think it was some kind of scam designed purely to sell the book on the understanding that the secret lay within the book, so I thought I'd try to clear up any misconceptions. There is nothing in the book concerning my own work on trying to solve this puzzle, it is a biography about Johann Bessler aka Orffyreus.
So on to the second reason for this post. technoguy commented that 'the only problem I had about the book was the end where you go into a gravity "wind" theory of how the wheels worked.' The truth is the book originally finished before the final chapter but the publisher I did have lined up had requested two things of me; one to reduce the size of the book to 90,000 words - its current length and half its original; and secondly to add a chapter about how it might have worked and what it would mean to people of our time. It was bound to be highly speculative and if I had my time again I wouldn't have added the last chapter. Back then I had less idea about how it might be explained.
And finally, an anonymous poster asked what the title of the new book would be? I had thought something on the lines of "The legened of Bessler's wheel and the Orffyreus Code", but I'm open to suggestions and should the the MS be successfully published and my suggestion of a title be accepted - and it is one that one of you has suggested to me, then due acknowledgement will be included in the acknowledgement section of the book. If there are some acceptable suggestions I'll post them somewhere on the first page of this blog with the author's name attached
JC
