John Collins is 70 today!

I'm seventy years of age today and in this year, I'm determined to show a proof of principle wheel or how to configure one - and soon.  I am confident that I have the whole solution and it has only taken me 55 years to get here!

I was about 15 when I first read an account of the legend of Bessler's wheel and I spent much of my youth doodling designs which I now know were way off the mark.  When I was about 30  I came across the same book I had read when I was 15 and it re-inspired me to look again into the mystery of Bessler's wheel. I remembered my own scepticism about the assumption that Bessler was a fraud and why, and I determined to get to the truth.  The book was the famous, 'Oddities', by R.Gould and it has served to re-inspire me over the years.

I sought original documents from all over Europe and the USA.  It took years and even when I had copies I couldn't read any of it because it was mostly in German.  I knew I would eventually get it all translated but I did not realise how expensive a task that was going to be.  In the end I advertised in a local paper for someone who was prepared to translate 18th C. German documents for free.

I had about eight replies and although I gave samples to all the respondents, only one stood out. Mike Senior with degrees in 18th C. German - and ancient Greek, astronomy and botany of all things!  He also reads Latin and can quote verbatim from memory, from the ancient Greek texts - and of course speaks fluent German. He is a member of Mensa and regularly has letters published in various science magazines.  Mike has done all my German translations and when he asked me if I wanted a literal translation or did I prefer something more readable that conveyed the spirit of the what the author was trying to say, I chose the latter.  I never realised at that time how Mike's words would be pored over, criticised and sometimes dismissed as inaccurate.  We had no way of knowing that future researchers would seek out clues from the very words used and perhaps I should have stuck to the literal, but it is what it is.

I'm pleased that so many people around the world now have Bessler's words, drawings, thoughts and clues and I hope that they will soon lead to the solution.  The worst thing would be for his work to be lost and for another 300 years pass before the solution was found again.  I really don't think that is going to happen!

So I'm of going out today with my wife and two daughters to celebrate my 70 years and then tomorrow I shall return (at last) to work on my Besslerwheel and finish it!

JC

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Springs? Not in the way you mean.

Many researchers are convinced that Bessler's wheel contained springs for some undetermined use and I agree that there probably were.  Bessler stated that there were no springs such as are used in clocks and all the usual uses for which his opponents implied.  They suggested that without the springs the wheel would quickly come to a stop.  I have noted many times that Bessler suggests that there might have been springs but they were not crucial to the wheel's operation.

In my own work on this project I have noted that there are situation where a spring could be useful. If you have a lever with a weight on the end and the wheel is rotated by hand to a position where the weighted lever is ready to fall, it has reached what I shall call, the pre-fall position.  At that point you hand-rotate the wheel one or two degrees and the weight falls, right?  But in a real time scenario the wheel is rotating, let us say, under its own steam, or you have given it a push so that it rotates, the weighted lever does not fall just after the same pre-fall position that it did when you hand-turned the wheel.  It goes on for perhaps another 10 or 15 degrees before it grudgingly falls.

In this instance I have placed a weak spring with a fairly long amount of travel in it for the weighted lever to land on and compress.  It is, as I say, very soft and when the wheel and its lever continues to rotate to the next pre-fall position, the inclination for the lever to fall is activated more immediately because the load holding the spring compressed weakens as the lever approaches the pre-fall position, giving  it a little push to bring about the fall.

This fact is due to the wheel's rotation while the lever is about to fall.  When stationary the lever responds to the next incremental degree of rotation and falls; when the wheel is already in rotation the combination of wheel travel and lever-tipping is merged so that the lever is actually falling while its position on the wheel is also falling.

Another way to engender a faster response in the fall of the lever, is to find the pre-fall position first, and then set the lever forward a few degrees so that it begins its fall ahead of the pre-fall point at which its position on the wheel begins to fall.  This does of course limit the amount of travel available for inducing overbalance, but even the smallest difference should be sufficient to overbalance the wheel.

My apologies if this is difficult to explain but it is a genuine problem and solution.  I suggested many years ago that the amount of travel by the weights would  prove to be limited for just this reason. Those who sought success by designing weights to move a maximum amount from inner to outer would be sure to suffer failure in a working model.

As a committed hands-on builder, I am sceptical about simulation software revealing the above facts and so I continue to build.  I am sure that many will jump to the defence of simulation, but I am sure that such niggles will prove invisible unless the input includes such variables.

JC

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Update - I am right and everyone else is wrong?

Having spent three weeks away recently, I was looking forward to returning to work on my latest version of Bessler's wheel, but this intention has been thwarted by several illnesses in my family.  My family comes first so I have managed to spend less than half an hour there, since before the Christmas holidays..  I had hoped to prove my design for my own satisfaction very soon but it looks as though it will have to wait.

This is a little frustrating for me as I wanted to get the model tested before completing it.  How can I test an incomplete model?  I think that if two mechanism work as I predict they will, then the rest is plain sailing.  I just have to complete the other mechanisms.

One of my recurring concerns is reading about other people's theories about what this or that clue meant.  The authors sound so confident and yet when I read about how this or that design is supposed to fit in with this or that clue etc, part of me wants to show them the errors they are making, because I know how it is supposed to work.

I understand that everyone has their own pet theories and there can't be two which apply equally if they are different, so why should mine be any more likely to lead to the correct solution?  I made a major discovery, possibly as long as two years ago now, and yet I have only recently worked out how to apply it and that after several false starts.  I made this important discovery and subsequently found out exactly what Bessler was intending to convey in his various clues.  Finding further support for my conclusions became a matter of rereading everything, relating what I found to the clues themselves. This being so I am unceasingly surprised at claims similar to mine but which are clearly no way the same as mine. I read their explanation and the temptation to show them why they are so far off the correct interpretation is difficult to resist.  But perhaps it is me who has got the wrong end of the stick, or is it the other guy, or are we both wrong?

What I do know, and this is the vaguest of clues, Scott Ellis founder of the Bessler wheel forum put me on the right track many years ago although I did not recognise it until recently.

For what it's worth, I do not find anything of value in designs for Bessler's wheel which include the use of springs, magnets or temperature variations, I am satisfied that it all hangs on gravity and it will be shown that there is no conflict with the laws of physics.  In fact it has to be gravity and it can't break any physical laws.

My feeling is that my understanding is correct and everyone else is wrong.  It’s very hard to be a lone voice in the wilderness, as we all are. It’s difficult to feel, know, and speak your truth and be greeted by either the dull thud of indifference or the resounding bellow of opposition, scorn and even anger.

The way you respond says a lot about your character. Do you fold up, shut down, or otherwise retreat from speaking your truth? Do you fight back until you wear yourself out? Do you try to prove that what you are saying is right, and that what everyone else is saying is wrong? But one thing is clear: if the upstart perpetual motionists prove to be right, and the others were wrong, what a day of celebration!  So despite opposition and competition I shall continue to seek the solution until I succeed.

 May this be an inspiration to you.

JC

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Perpetual Motion in Nature?

It has been suggested many times that the secret to discovering how to make a perpetual motion machine will be found in Nature.  One immediately thinks of gravity, but usually it is thought that that is not what those who expressed such an idea had in mind.  They implied that if examples of perpetual motion did not exist in nature then it wasn't possible. 

They declared that history shows that we (mankind) have found a way of obtaining usable motion from the force of the wind and of moving water etc. but for perpetual motion there had to be another  force available to tap and since all forces were known and already utilised there could be no such device otherwise it would have already been invented.

It has been assumed that they sought some kind of mechanical action in nature.  Examples such as the spinning of a sycamore seed as it falls to earth; the way grass and weeds could force their way up through concrete; the expansion of water as it freezes, breaking glass and pottery utensils; the rising tide lifting boats that were grounded at low tide; the expansion of steam in a boiler.  All these actions and their causes were clearly evident and ways could be found to make use of them, but not gravity apparently.

Yet gravity is a force of nature.  Without it the sycamore seed would not fall;  the tides would not rise and fall.  In fact none of the actions in nature  mentioned above that have been observed have led directly to an invention.  Of course there are examples of single-bladed propellers, not dissimilar to the sycamore seed, but that was not the first design derived from such an idea but was developed for other reasons later in the history of flight.  I doubt that the windmill derived from observation of the effect of the wind on trees and falling leaves.  It is more likely that initially the use of sails on sailing boats  led to the use of windmill sails made of canvas, such as were and are used all over the middle East.  Sails probably developed from seeing sheets of cotton or dyed materials, drying in the wind on lines, So although the action of forces on material things was observed and ways of using them discovered, finding ways of using gravity other than for falling weight clocks, not a continuous process such as was sought, was deemed impossible.

So what Bernouille and Boyle, for instance, were saying, was that we needed to find a force in nature to power the perpetual motion machine; not necessarily a specific mechanical action observed in nature.  Of course perpetual is an ambiguous word; if a machine ran for ten years it would be as good as a perpetual motion machine; a windmill could be described as a perpetual motion machine as long as the wind continued to blow, but neither are perpetual in the literal sense of the word.

It has been assumed that looking for the answer in nature meant finding an example of perpetual motion in action rather than simply an available force such as gravity.  Gravity is obviously that force and is really the only one left to us that might accommodate our aim - and it's entrance into the world of continuous propulsion is imminent.

In describing perpetual motion as being acceptable if it only lasted ten years, I omitted to point to the spinning of our planet earth as a perpetual motion machine, which has been spinning for a lot more than ten years; perpetual motion is all around us and is clearly continuous as far as we are concerned even if ultimately it stops.

JC

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