Merry Christmas to All Perpetual Motionists!

I just want to wish all of you a very happy and peaceful Christmas.

I was slightly concerned that some readers might not celebrate Christmas as many of us do, because of religious differences.  So in wishing you a traditional Christmas greeting I am including all the good things associated with this greeting, such as happiness, peace and well-being, regardless of the  religious connotations.

As some may know, I am an agnostic, but I still celebrate the seasons as if I were a committed Christian, because I support the values associated with Christianity, even if I am unable accept the teachings it espouses.

JC

Is Over-balancing a Side-effect of some other Principle?

Having spent the last 50 years or so trying to discover Bessler's secret I realised some time back, that the solution must be something really simple, but not at all intuitive - not intuitive until you know but then instantly obvious.  It took Bessler about ten years to find the beginnings of an answer and even then, some very intense work to finally get a movement which proved to himself that he had found the correct principle.

The brief motion he discovered was so convincing that he dropped everything and went out into the world to earn some much needed funds to finance the building of a demonstration wheel and a place to show it.  He also persuaded a town mayor and physician of somewhat dubious political standing to allow him to take his daughter in marriage and accept her dowry.  This action sounds like a plan he had devised if and when the wheel worked.  To me this adds support to the idea that simply finding that basic principle and then deducing how to use it provides enough evidence that full test rigs and lengthy runs loaded and unloaded are unnecessary to prove the point, to ones self. But  I realise of course,  that such tests are a vital ingredient for anyone in the enviable position of having got to that penultimate stage that Bessler achieved prior to his search for funding.  You can only actually prove your wheel works by demonstrating it in action.

So first we have to find that simple concept which was so obvious that when Bessler discovered it he was encouraged to attack the problem with renewed enthusiasm.  I think that this concept was unarguably a vital part of the wheel's design. But Bessler admits that it took immense effort to find a way of making use of this principle, which suggests that even though the answer is perfectly logical it requires some considerable mechanical arranging to discover a way of utilising said principle. In my opinion this kind of trial and error method is an ideal way to hit upon the correct mechanical arrangement once you have the principle that allows the wheel to be driven in the presence of gravity.

This principle which I believe Bessler discovered must obviously be the light at the end of an extremely long tunnel, and yet even once discovered would take lengthy experimentation to find the correct mechanical arrangement to make it work.  Such a principle rules out the simple over-balancing wheel, according to Bessler, and yet an over-balancing ingredient seems to be implied in Bessler's description, although couched in the most ambiguous of terms.  It seems that action due to the operation of the prime principle leads to an overbalancing situation but the latter is more of a side effect than the primary cause of continuous rotation.  It is as though we have omitted a step in trying to generate continuous rotation through seeking to cause over-balancing, when we should be looking for some additional feature which then leads to overbalancing.

JC

One-way wheels and two-way wheels - the best way forward.

I thought it might be useful to rehearse my own thoughts here as I have not written about this subject for a long time, although it's in my mind constantly.

Bessler's largest wheel, the Kassel wheel, was approximately 12 feet in diameter, and 18 imches thick.  It turned at 26 RPM unloaded and 20 RPM when lifting a heavy box of stones.  It could turn in either direction if given a slight nudge in one direction or the other, after which it accelerated to its full speed in 2 to 3 turns.  This wheel's predecessor, the Merseberg wheel, was of a similar size but thinner at only a little over 11 inches thick.  It could turn at 40 RPM and was also able to turn in either direction.

These two wheels were designed and built to answer the accusation that the earlier ones were driven by clockwork.  The earlier ones were able to begin to spin immediately their brakes were released.  This fact suggests that they were in a permanent state of imbalance - or that a weight was always able to fall at the exact point that the wheel reached a balanced position thus continuing the imbalance.  In the Merseberg and Kassel wheels I visualise there being two sets of weights -  one for each direction, a kind of mirror image arrangement.  The two-directional wheels obviously would not turn without a nudge in one direction, because the weight which fell as soon as balance was reached was counteracted by the weight which fell into position to turn the wheel the other way.

Once the wheel was turning, howver, one of the weights would move backward and therefore have no positive effect on rotation, while the other continued the imbalancing process. That's the theory; of course designing an arrangement of weights which fulfills the theory and works is another matter.  

It seems clear that there were several variables which could be applied to the design of the wheel, which could make it turn faster or slower, using weights of varying size.  Bessler claims such in his Apologia Poetica, and his demonstrations seem to prove that.  The obvious variables include weights of different sizes and more or less of them; thinner and thicker wheels and large diameter wheels and potentially more mechanisms.

In my opinion the first one-way wheels hold the key to success, assuming that the internal mechanisms in the later ones were based on the earlier ones.  Although we know that the Kassel wheel produced about eight bangs on its falling side, we have no knowledge of how many noises accompanied the spinning of the earlier ones - just that a loud noise was produced.  I mention this because it might be wise to leave aside any assumption that there would need to be eight bangs to somehow include in the earlier more basic wheel.  Bessler implied that he was able to barely induce a wheel to turn with just one cross-bar inside it, which could mean one pair of weights operating within a single but complete mechanism.

So I, at least, continue to work on producing a one-way wheel, but with five mechanisms which I believe Bessler indicated, is the most that can be fitted into the wheel.  That indicates to me that the more mechanisms the better - and five seems to me to be the answer, or part of it.  So four would not produce as much torque as five and three even less.

Many people work on the theory that because there were about eight bangs on the side towards which the Kassel wheel turned, that fact can be assumed as relevant to the other wheels, but I believe that the earlier ones were simpler with less mechanisms inside and therefore fewer sources of noise.  Being of a simpler design they should be easier to replicate - why try to build a two-way wheel when a one-way wheel would prove the point.

JC

Update - new workshop imminent; working wheel still impending; house alterations beginning Monday.

Once upon a time it was usual for a perpetual motionist to create within his own mind, a mechanical arrangement which he believed might work, and then bring it to life in a physical three-dimensional real life creation. Then he could study it and perhaps tweak it to try to get the device to begin to spin continuously - or nderstand why it didn't work.  It was not felt necessary to introduce mathematical formulae to discover the solution.

Of course whether he knew it or not, maths guided the way his mechanisms moved but Johann Bessler did not need to include it in his research because he simply used his knowledge of organ-building to devise new ways of moving the various parts.  But this knowledge was not sufficient to find the solution.  It required a spark of inspiration which came to him in the middle of the night - a principle upon which he based his new mental creations and which eventually led to his success. He discovered the correct premise and used it to deduce the correct conclusion.

Now I see that the Besslerwheel forum is filled with discussions concerning spreadsheets, simulations, obscure acronyms, modernised metrics, technical jargon that covers subjects which, back in the day, were labelled differently and whose means of calculation would probably be as difficult to understand by today's minds as their own working methods are to those of us who learned it all in a different way many years ago. Fortunately I have never seen the necessity for including all this stuff in my work, as I operate in the same way that I described above and which I believe Johann Bessler did.  Visualisation, seeing it in my mind's eye, imagining it, sketching ideas on paper, building a bit at a time and testing the part to check that it works as I envisaged - that is my method.

I've had this basic principle in my own mind for more than three years now and the reason it has taken so long to produce a working version of the wheel is due to the difficulty of incorporating the requirements of this principle in a way that works.  Johann Bessler reported that, following the discovery of this principle in a dream, he returned to work with renewed vigour and hope, yet it still took him many months of toil to produce the first beginnings of continuous rotation.

If I'm correct in my own belief that I do have the solution, I don't want to just give the answer away without at least building a proof of principle wheel, not because the concept needs the proof, (it's that simple!) but just for the sheer joy of being the first since Johann Bessler to demonstrate to the public how it works (unless, of course,someone else does it first!)

My new workshop will be built soon, hopefully before Christmas, but if not then, it will be ready in January, and after that I hope to complete my Bessler wheel, video it with a full explanation and publish it here and elsewhere. 

Work on the house we moved into in the Summer is due to start next week and we will be staying with my daughter sometimes, assuming that the electricity will have to be turned off from time to time as work progresses and although we have a wood burning stove I think its going to be a mighty cold Christmas, with some walls being taken out and new ones to be built!

JC