Update for August 2018 - Are there some missing Clues?

I have been finding the occasional half hour or so to work on my Bessler-wheel and I am confident it will be finished some time in September or October.  I’m away for a week in September but I hope to finish it once I return from my brief holiday.

I'm assuming that this latest construction will work - and my test mechanisms does perform exactly as I planned.  There have been minor construction problems which had to be overcome along the way but so far I have dealt successfully with each one.  They are not serious setbacks, typically, a case of rearranging some pieces so they don’t collide with other parts of the same mechanism.

Despite the apparent difficulties in understanding the clues and interpreting them correctly the concept is not complicated and Bessler could have provided easier clues, but then his fear of someone interpreting them too soon, prevented him.  This raises an interesting question.  Did he ever expect anyone to decipher his clues in his lifetime?  One would assume not, in which case, why did he think someone would be able to do so after his death?  Was there some additional clue that he hoped would assist in deciphering his clues after his death.  I mention this because I have not found any evidence that anyone attempted to solve the clues during his life time.

I’m sure that, in the event that he failed to find a buyer for his secret, he intended to leave enough information available after his death to allow people to reconstruct his machine and give him the acknowledgement he so desperately needed.  He commented on that very point in his Apologia Poetica and said he'd be content with post humus acknowledgement if he failed to sell his secret. That document was published in 1715, only three years after his first claim to have built a working perpetual motion machine, so even then he was considering the possibility of no-sale and what he could do about it. 

One can imagine the frustration he suffered, thinking that he could sell his secret quickly and get on with his future plans but then discovering things were not as easy as he had thought.  After only three years he was considering his options, and yet he continued for another ten years at Kassel castle without a sale.  No wonder he was described as ill-tempered and unpleasant.

In my book I surmised that since he sought permission to build a grave or mausoleum in the garden of his house in Carlshafen, it might have contained a clue, but unfortunately the latest estimate is that the garden is now part of a car park in town, so probably the gravestones which might have held a useful clue, have long since been obliterated or lost.

There is the possibility that the Maschinen Tractate drawings which he destroyed were intended to reveal the secret after his death because they would be found in his effects.  But as he wrote, the arrest made him destroy them, because once he was incarcerated someone might have gained access to his possessions, or his wife might have sold them, and the secret would be worthless.

JC

After 300 Years Bessler’s Wheel is Nigh.

One of the endless problems we face, researching Johann Bessler’s claims to have invented and built a perpetual motion machine, is the reaction of the vast majority of people.  It isn’t just the scientists, teachers, theoreticians, historians and other “experts”; it is ordinary people like ourselves who dismiss with either scorn, humour or irritation our tentative suggestion that Bessler might have been telling the truth.

I have never believed that Bessler’s perpetual motion machine supported itself with an internal closed energy supply and those people who mock us for thinking that, must think we are complete idiots. The definition of perpetual motion has altered somewhat in the intervening 300 plus years but I have always believed that it must have an external energy supply and in my opinion, gravity lies at the root of the energy consumed by Bessler’s wheel. Gravity is the best and probably the only force capable of providing continuous rotation to Bessler’s wheel.

The energy supplied by gravity enables the weights to fall, so some people insist that Bessler’s wheel was gravity-enabled not gravity-driven.  If a wheel can be built and the weights within,  fall due to the effect of gravity, and they are configured in a similar way to those within Bessler’s wheel, resulting in the wheel rotating continuously, then I cannot see anything wrong with calling it a gravity-driven wheel.

There are so many ways we use gravity’s force via some other medium, that to suggest it couldn’t have been done in Bessler’s wheel is just ignoring the evidence that his wheel worked.  I know all the arguments repeated parrot fashion ad nauseam against this subject and I have firmly dismissed them over the last few years.  At the beginning I wasn’t sure, but the more I studied it the more certain I became that I was right. Johann Bessler himself was not entirely happy with the designation, “perpetual motion” for his machine, but could only say that it was propelled by the weights.

I once thought it would be possible to persuade a scientist or professor of the truth of Bessler’s claims, and thence get him to devote time and money to studying Bessler’s wheel and in the end develop a working model.  But the reaction to my efforts was universal.  Fear of failure, fear of peer’s bad reaction, loss of reputation, fear of losing job, fear of not getting another, fear of family recriminations and worst of all, loss of standing in a very reputation conscious society.  I did find a scientist who was very interested but he wanted to see a working proof of principle model, before he committed time and money to its development. Nothing has changed.  We are on our own and even when we succeed there will be doubters and a vicious backlash from the intellectuals, and there are even some who suggest that a planet full of gravity-driven wheels will somehow effect earth’s rotation and stability and doubtless they will join in the clamour of discontent and disbelief.

But no one can argue with working gravity-wheel and once it’s design and method of application have been explained they will all eventually have to concur that they were wrong.

JC

A Vicious Circle and a Virtuous Circle.

Someone commented that using Bessler’s wheel to generate electricity was a medieval method and once the wheel’s concept was understood it could be applied for use with other forces such as gravity.  It made me think about other methods we use today which still relate to an origin first invented in years gone by.

Waterwheels have been used for at least 2500 years and although they are slowly going out of use their basic function to supply energy in some form or other is still being investigated in different ways, for instance tapping tidal energy.

Windmills too, are of ancient lineage, at least 2000 years of age, with similar uses, grinding corn etc. Again they’ve been adapted to produce giant electricity generators but with several disadvantages but they do provide electricity as long as the wind blows, and not too hard!

Steam engines are a relatively new invention, although  their first reference goes back 2000 years to Hero of Alexandria.  But we still use a derivative of the steam engine in our giant electricity generating turbines, most of which still depend on steam to power their mechanical rotation.

Finally there are the weight-driven clocks - not, of course, continuous motion in the way the earlier examples work, but similar in some ways.  The first examples at the beginning of this post all depend upon a supply of energy of some kind.  That energy reveals itself in action, moving water, pressurised steam from heated water,  or wind blowing over the sails of a windmill.

But is there an origin either in history or nature, as there is for the above examples, in Bessler’s wheel? Actually all of them rely on a constant supply of energy and despite what we have been taught so does Bessler’s wheel.  This is usually where we part company with mainstream ideology!

Remember that we are taught that perpetual motion machines were declared axiomatically impossible by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847, because, he declared, no one had ever built one!  An axiom is a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true.  Only Helmholtz did not accept the validity of Bessler’s wheel otherwise the axiom would be demonstrably false.

Most of the above examples obtain their energy from something already in motion and simply draw their energy needs from it.  Wind and water; Bessler’s wheel drew its energy from something in motion too.....weights, falling weights responding to gravity.

I think that no PM machine has revealed itself, other than Bessler’s, because these other kinds of machine were available and more obviously capable of being designed to make use of whatever medium the builders had in mind.  Bessler said that the reason he was successful was that he devoted so much more time and effort in finding the correct principle than anyone else had ever been able do.

Helmholtz  declared that  Perpetual Motion machine’s were impossible because no one  had ever built one.  This is a perfect example of circuitous reasoning and perhaps a literary example of perpetual motion.

Question  - why has no one ever built a perpetual motion machine?

Answer- because Helmholtz says they’re impossible.

Question - why are they impossible?

Answer - because no one has ever built one.

Repeat ad infinitum!

The terms virtuous circle and vicious circle refer to complex chains of events that reinforce themselves through a feedback loop. A virtuous circle has favorable results, while a vicious circle has detrimental results. Bessler's wheel demonstrated a virtuous circle.

JC

Alternative Benefits from Bessler's Wheel?

If Bessler’s wheel should finally materialise and is shown to work due to the effect of gravity on some moveable weights, then we can make a provisional assumption that it might be possible to apply a similar configuration to other conservative forces.

Many here have expressed the opinion that once built Bessler’s wheel would be weak and of limited use.  In my opinion they are wrong and there will be many uses, particularly in third world countries for basic energy generation, irrigation, refrigeration etc.

There is also the potential to creat a reverse system based on the concept behind Bessler's wheel in which a drive is fitted to the reverse design to produce inertial thrust in a particular direction.  There is potential in such a scheme for boats and even space travel. etc.  But there is one more area of science which I think may hold even more potential.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology lead the field in nano energy research.  This complex subject is full of potential uses for nano engineering, but my knowledge is very limited. This quote from an acquaitence at my local university, “Nanotechnology involves the creation and/or manipulation of materials at the nanometre (nm) scale. One nanometre is 10-9 m or one millionth of a millimetre. Nanotechnology is essentially ‘engineering at a very small scale’, and this term can be applied to many areas of research and development – from medicine to manufacturing to computing, and even to textiles and cosmetics”.  Fortunately,  I was talking to someone who used to be a good friend of Mike Senior,  a couple of days ago about my work with Johann Bessler.  This guy is a Professor at Warwick university and it was his idea that if we could prove that Bessler’s wheel worked there were numerous potential applications within the field of nanotechnology.

You can get an idea of the ongoing research by looking at this page

http://www.understandingnano.com/nanotechnology-energy.html

The author lists a number of developments currently being researched and my contact at Warwick University suggested that nano-engineering could make use of the design concept used in Bessler’s wheel.

I cannot confirm or deny the potential but I thought it worth mentioning.  There are people here with far more knowledge and greater intellectual abilities than I have, so I hope perhaps they might comment more knowledgeably than I could?

NB These additional links provided by arktod 1001.

https://imgur.com/a/9Jpin

http://vixra.org/pdf/1512.0276v1.pdf

http://vixra.org/pdf/1404.0097v1.pdf

JC

Simulate or Fabricate?

I moved house two years ago and took the opportunity to throw out most of my old bits and pieces of wheel experiments.  I had hoarded them thinking that I might want to go back at some point to revisit an earlier idea.  But then I realised that after almost 40 years of fabrication I had progressed to the point where I knew instinctively what would or wouldn’t be useful in a new design.  So I bought in new material and once I had my workshop up and running, earlier this year, I set to with renewed enthusiasm to build my latesy version of Bessler's wheel..

And that is my point; I have tinkered with simulations from time to time but have never had the same feedback that I get from actually handling the piecwes, and have dismissed them as a waste of time. Making parts, manipulating them, finding that sometimes they don’t work as you expected, or discovering new movements in the process, or  they inspire new thoughts and designs - you cannot beat actually building the wheels.  It generates enthusiasm for new designs - well it does for me.  BTW, I cannot imagine anyone who is not an incurable optimist ever solving this puzzle.  You need a 100 per cent positive attitude to find the answer.

The design I’m building has been more or less complete in my mind for a couple of years and I am sure that it would be difficult to build a simulation so an actual build is the best thing and anyway you would need to build it eventually just to prove you were right.  Maybe the simulation might indicate that it would not work because of some simple error in the input or the settings.

I’ve seen any number of comments about problems with a simulation and I simply don’t trust them. I’m sure that an expensive simulation software could predict the correct solution, but these off-the-shelf versions seem to me to be full of glitches and are not to be trusted.

Returning to my own build, I set out the design parameters and copied them onto the backboard (the wooden disc which will hold all the parts) and drilled the necessary holes in exactly the right places. I fitted the levers on their swivel posts.  The levers were precisely the correct length.....but when I manually rotated them, two of them touched two adjoining levers, interfering with their actions. Admittedly space was tight and I could have planned for them to have more room, but it is surprising how hard you try for extreme accuracy you can still overlook some small discrepancy in the position of for instance a swivel post.

In fact the accuracy of the positioning of the posts is not vital to success.  A millimetre in any direction would not affect the viability of the design.  So I drilled two new holes and corrected the problem.

It has been often stated that there is only one design that will work,  but is this true? I ask this for two reasons, firstly Bessler said he had several designs which would work, and secondly I am aware of at least one design which apparently works. I have seen the design on paper and I cannot say for sure if it will work, but it seems that a working model was made.  What I can say is that this design is different to mine and I do know that my design is the same as the one Bessler intended to pass on to us. This suggests that there is more than one way to use gravity as an enabler of continuous rotation.

I can see from my own design that it looks possible to create the same effect usng differenr mechanism designs.

So my preference is definitely for fabrication but I know many people swear by simulations and animations. 

JC

Challenging the Belief that it is Not Possible to Obtain Energy from Gravity

In my last post I commented that gravity might not be an energy source, just as we have been taught and continue to be so - but many years ago I came to the conclusion that this must be wrong.  My reasons for this are briefly discussed below.

If we believe (as I do) that Bessler told the truth then his implication that gravity provided the sole means of energy for his wheel means that gravity can be used as the ultimate source of energy for the wheel, even though we have been taught that this is impossible.  Please read on for my explanation.

The many tests and demonstrations the wheel underwent, all indicate that what Bessler said was true, and since he did not dare to cheat because being found cheating could lead to execution by the axeman, we have to accept his assurances.  In support of this we have the word of a knowledgeable man, Karl the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, known for his absolute integrity, that the machine was genuine because he had studied the interior.

Dismissing these points means that it is unlikely that anyone will ever find the solution to Bessler's wheel, despite the fact that we know it worked.

Apologies for briefly going back to basics.  In the case of a conservative force the total work done in moving a particle between two points is independent of the taken path. When an object moves from one location to another, the force changes the potential energy of the object by an amount that does not depend on the path taken.

In other words, in the case of gravity, if something is dropped it loses the potential energy it had at a higher point.  But we can restore it by lifting the object dropped, back up to its higher point

In the case of a non-conservative force the energy that it removes from the system is no longer available to the system for kinetic energy.

So our problem lies in finding a way to lift the fallen weight back up without using any additional forces other than gravity.

This is said to be impossible because the energy expended in dropping the weight has to be found in order to lift it back up again, but the energy has already been spent so there is no way to use gravity to lift it back up again - even though gravity is a continuous force, and a non-conservaive force could not drive a wheel of continuous rotation. Therefore it has to be a conservative force driving Bessler's wheel.

I have suggested the following argument countless times and people still don't get it.  The interface between gravity and Bessler's wheel is the weights.  Gravity makes the weights fall, and the weights make the wheel turn.

Interfaces play a major part in all types of motion. Wind and sails, steam and piston, flowing water and waterwheels, etc.  In each case an energy source provides the impetus and the interfaces react to provide motion.  So it is with gravity, it provides the force and the weights react to it.

Returning to my point about Bessler's wheel and not looking for an additional source of energy, everyone has been looking for this mysterious energy source that has been  suggested, for many years.  They have been unsuccessful because no such other source exists and neither is it necessary.  Steam, ambient temperature changes, bellows, live animals have all been suggested but nothing has been able demonstrate a similar power output which Bessler's wheel did relying purely on gravity

Therefore we must assume  that there was no other force used, and that leads us to the only possioble conclusion, Bessler found a way to use gravity alone to drive his machine, and that leads us to the final conclusion and it is this;

There is a way to configure the weights so that they respond to the effect of gravity by creating an permanent excess weight on the downwards side of the axle.  In confirmation of this, even when the wheel is stopped the overbalancing effect is still in operation and only the brake prevents the wheel from turning.  This overbalancing is produced automatically as soon as either a weight falls, or a weight has already fallen.  No other scenario can explain this feature of the wheel.

We can calculate the work done by gravity in making a weight fall by multiplying the mass of the weight times the distance it falls vertically, so at least we are allowed to assume gravity does do work!  The assumption that we cannot use gravity as an energy source relies totally on empiricism, a definition of which is, 'by means of observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic,'   In other words the conclusion that gravity cannot be an energy source relies not so much on theory and logic as by observation.  In other words no one has even been able to configure the weights to make wheel rotate continuously therefore it must be impossible.

If you are still reluctant to accept the premise that gravity is a source of energy consider the following. British clockmaker William Clement produced the first longcase clocks around 1680. It could run for a week without having the weights raised to restart the clock.  That's a week of gravity power.  But now consider this.

The Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a mechanical clock under construction, that is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. The project to build it is part of the Long Now Foundation.

https://www.wired.com/2011/06/10000-year-clock/ 

The project was conceived by Danny Hillis in 1986. The first prototype of the clock began working on December 31, 1999, just in time to display the transition to the year 2000. At midnight on New Year's Eve, the date indicator changed from 01999 to 02000, and the chime struck twice. The two-meter prototype is on display at the Science Museum in London.

As of June 2018 , two more recent prototypes are on display at The Long Now Museum & Store at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

The manufacture and site construction of the first full-scale prototype clock is being funded by Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions, founder of Amazon, with $42 million, and is on land which Bezos owns in Texas.

A clock designed to run for 10,000 years purely on the force of gravity.  Do you still think gravity is not a source of energy?

JC

Are There Any More Doubting Lions Roaring Around?

I borrowed the title of today's blog from Bessler's own words challenging those who disbelieved him to come and sit by his machine as it revolved.

I note that the the old familiar doubt about the truth of Bessler's claims has reared its ugly head again, on the Bessler wheel forum.

I published my book about Johann Bessler in 1996, and I thought I did a pretty good job of providing as much evidence as possible about Bessler and his machine and the tests, and the witness reports, and the letters about him, to him and by him.  I wrote and published the book because I was convinced of his sincerity about his machine.  Not only was the evidence convincing but you could feel the sncerity in the pain and anguish he suffered and emoted in detail in Apologia Poetica.  In my opinion no scam artist could write with such evident sincerity about his feelings about the rejection of his machine.

So when I read that someone who is relatively new to the forum keeps repeating the mantra, "if Bessler was telling the truth," or "perhaps Bessler lied,"  and often misquotes incorrectly passages from the book and all manner of untruths and half truths, I'm tempted to stop trying to persuade people of Bessler's ingenious machine and how much benefit it could bring to the planet earth in these difficult times. Why can't people only their write their ideas once they are in possession of the correct facts?

But in fairness to all those who aren't as familiar with the legend of Bessler's wheel as I am, I admit that over 300 years of schools and universities hammering the facts that perpetual motion machines are impossible and gravity cannot be used as Bessler seems to imply, is a paradigm that is going to take more than an ancient retired engineer (me!) berating them from a small insignificant blog, to persuade them that they are wrong.

There does seem to be the perennial question over the role of gravity in Bessler's wheel. Over the years I have come to accept that gravity itself cannot be regarded as a source of energy and the nuances of the connection between gravity itself and the force that drove Bessler's wheel are subtle and hard to explain, but this is my opinion.

Bessler implied that gravity was the source of energy but he did not say so explicitly.  He simply said that it was the excess weight, or extra heaviness on one side of the wheel that caused the wheel to overbalance, but we and thousands like us have been working on that theory for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.  He did not use the word 'gravity' because that word was coined almost accidentally by Sir Isaac Newton when he used it in his famous book, Principia' and in Besslers day that was largely unread by anyone other than the top philosophers of the day.  Newton's book was written in Latin, the universal language of learning, and he used the word 'gravity' as the Latin for 'heaviness' to describe this force we all call ‘gravity’ now.  But in Bessler's day they use words such as preponderance which can  mean superiority in weight or significance. This meaning relates to the word's Latin roots in the word praeponderare, which means "outweigh."  So looking for the word ‘gravity’ in Bessler’s papers will result in none being found.

Why have our teachers told us it is impossible?    Because gravity is a conservative force and the energy expended in causing a weight to fall exactly equals that  available to raise it again, and only then if you omit the energy used to overcome friction.

A weight can fall through any path, straight down or around in a curve, all that matters is the straight line vertical distance traveled.  These two factors mean a weight would have to fall in a closed loop, zero energy would be used, which would be impossible.  The assumption is that this rules out any chance of a weight driven wheel. working.

But they deny that it is possible to configure the movement of the weights to create a variation which would break open the closed loop making an asymmetrical loop.  If you study the argument if depends upon the motion of one weight around a circle, but we have always attempted to find a way to include various movements of each weight during its path around the circle in an attempt to create a variation on the closed loop which would achieve continuous rotation.  BTW note my preference of the phrase 'continuous motion' or 'continuous rotation' rather than 'perpetual motion', I just think its more accurate and less inflammatory.

NB I forgot to say that even though gravity is a conservative force and isn't a source of energy, the transfer of energy from the force of gravity to the weights is undeniable because it is this transference which enables the weights to fall.

My own wheel has been designed with a break in its closed loop which provides for a variable between each side of the centre of rotation and I am confident will lead to continuous rotation, but I didn't think of it myself, but was only able to work it out with Bessler's help!

Anyway whatever the result, work continues albeit slowly to the grand or not so grand finale.

JC