A belated expression of thanks to my first customers - and on with the show!

I've been looking for some old stamps for my grandaughter who has decided to start collecting them and I came across a huge bundle of envelopes I received from people all over the world when I first published my book. I have almost 400 stamps from so many different countries.

I'm amazed at how many I have and I think I should belatedly publish a word of thanks to all those people who took a chance on sending me a cheque to buy my book.  There was no PayPal nor anything similar back in 1997 and it must have seemed a risky purchase to send a cheque from one side of the world to the other.  The cheques themselves took six weeks to clear if they were in any denomination other than Pounds Sterling, which most of them were, but I couldn't leave people waiting all that time so I just sent the books and hoped the cheques would clear.  They all did and for that I'm extremely grateful.  

So I'd like to offer a belated thank you to all those people who risked a sum of money, with very little information about myself.  I guess we have grown older and wiser since then and are  much more aware and wary of internet scams than we were back then.  The internet was a new and exciting toy whose dangers most of us didn't fully appreciate.  Not only are we now much more clued up on the dangers of the internet but we are more cynical unfortunately.

My Spanish holiday gave me some much needed thinking time and I discovered some more information which has enabled me to produce a more accurate picture of the precise proportions of two parts of the mechanism.  I'm constantly amazed at the amount of information Bessler managed to secrete in various places under our eyes, without our noticing.  Anyway back to work, time marches on!

JC

300th anniversary approaching and no sign of success .... so far!

We're almost at the 300th anniversary of Johann Bessler's first exhibition - and I've a feeling it's going to be a bit a damp squib!  No sign of success either here or elsewhere although that may change very soon.  

I'm going away to Spain for a couple of weeks very early on Tuesday morning and I'll have to close the comments facility, but as soon as I get back it will be open again and I'll be back at work on my own wheel, unless of course someone has beaten me to the winning post and published their own working model!  I won't close the comments 'til Monday evening.

There have been a number of people who have said that they will have a working model by the 300th anniversary, myself among them, but I suspect that they won't materialise (mine won't).  My own work has gone well and I think that I have the right design if only roughly, and getting it perfect has proved more difficult than I anticipated.  But as I continue to build, adjust, build and adjust I learn more and more (about how to build a stationary wheel!).  I know that certain people will say I'm just fooling myself and my design will never work (I don't need to name you guys!) but I have something up my sleeve that may astound you once you know.

I'm taking a small computer with me in the hope of finding free wi-fi and I may post something if I can.

So good luck to all of you who are building or designing and I'll see you again soon.

JC

Divide the toys page into five parts.

I feel that the clues I have published may be too subtle for some to accept. This puzzles me, but of course I've had many years to study them and get inside Bessler's mind.  Obviously some people think I may be fooling myself but I have good reasons for thinking the clues are deliberate and real.  I never intended to give anything away when I published the clues and therefore by themselves they may seem unimportant, but I hope to explain why they are helpful in discovering the solution to Bessler's wheel.  I won't publish any more as I shall be away for a two weeks and will have to close the comments facility until my return.  I am taking a small computer with me and if I can find a wifi hotspot somewhere then I'll try to write something.  So, in the mean time....

3 days to go - 7th clue.  The items in the Toys page in MT, numbered 138, 139, 140 and 141, are labelled A, B, C, D and E (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  There is an additional hand-drawn item, a spinning top, which includes in the notes attached to it the number 5 (five again!). You can rather neatly divide the drawing labelled 'A' horizontally into five equal divisions.  You can run the horizontal lines across to the left and find that they match well with item 'B' and further across to the stork's bill/lazy tongs.

It has always seemed clear to me that the items labelled 'A' and 'B' are the same things - and with the five divisions in place, show they are also five repeated versions of items 'C' and 'D'.  'A' is shown with the five mechanical arrangements labelled 'C' and 'D' in an open position, and 'B' is the same but closed.

But item labelled 'E' is also similar - you should think of it as 'C' and 'D' linked together.

In other words, as I said in another post, the drawings are not what they appear to be, at first sight.

One more thing.  I could never understand why Johann Bessler added four numbers to the bottom of the page and I assumed that it was to show which pages he had omitted.  In fact this doesn't make sense because this is the last page and followed on from 137, which would have been the last page before he added the toys page. But four numbers doesn't relate to the five (or six) drawings he labelled, but here's an idea - 138, 139, 140 and 141 totals 558.

JC

Bessler's pendulums are not just pendulums.

Only 5 days to go  -  6th Clue. It seems that my suggestion that the pendulums are more than mere decorations is considered highly doubtful, so I shall have to try to convince the sceptics with some more clues.  I would like to convince most people that the secret lies in "taking various illustrations together and combining them with a discerning mind, it will indeed be possible to look for a movement and, finally to find one in them," - Bessler's words, but I couldn't have put it better myself.  

He published the Merseberg drawing in its original state in 1715, in Grundlicher Bericht, and the MT was not completed with the Toys page until about 1723 and yet in Apologia Poetica, also published in 1715, he had already hinted in quite strong terms that he had left a number of clues behind in case he died before the secret was out.

I'm surprised that I'm having to say this but perhaps I should point out here that the pendulums, as shown in his illustrations, are not to be taken literally, in other words they are not what they appear to be.- that would have been far too obvious  For instance, it's no good calculating their period of swing.  They weren't there as speed limiters or modifiers, but they were inside the wheel, but not in their current form.  If you think about it for a moment you realise that it would have been crazy for Bessler to put anything which was easily read and understood correctly as a clue; it had to be opaque, even to the serious researcher. 

I am not going to add any drawings here, but if you are interested, take a look at the Merseberg wheel illustration in Das Triumphirende.  Two hints here, firstly you all know the main wheel includes a pentagon aligned on the rope that passes behind the wheel, the sloping hatch marks are to help fill in the missing parts for one of the pentagons, of which there are two.  Why is the pentagon important?

The second hint is that there is clear evidence that the wheel facing you should be drawn larger than it is shown. Check out the tops of the two right hand pendulum pillars numbered 12, they're higher than the others for a reason, but the two wheels in the picture are the same height. The enlarged circle includes the outer end of the left side of the horizontal weight and also coincides with the right edge of the picture. I leave it to you to decide how one might make use of this.

More clues in other drawings to follow.

JC