Mike Senior - Translator of Johann Bessler's Works, has Passed away.

Back in 1996 I had all these pieces of paper all in German, which were the culmination of many years research into the life of Johann Bessler.  I was utterly stuck because I had all this information and I could not read it.  I had copies of 'Grundlicher Bericht', 'Apologia Poetica' and 'Das Triumphirende', in my hands and no way of knowing what it said.  I obtained quotes for translating it and I recall DT was going to cost in excess of £3000!  No way could I have afforded that.

With little hope of success I wrote a letter to the local newspaper explaining my situation and asking if there was anyone who might like to try and help me out.  Imagine my surprise and pleasure to get not one but five responses!  To cut a long story short, four of them gradually dropped out, only Mike Senior remained.  He turned out to be one in a million.  He was completely computer illiterate and translated everything in handwriting, filled with a profusion of notes about things Bessler had written.

His first task was to translate all the letters and news reports of the day, then he did Gruendlicher Bericht, but his hardest task was Apologia Poetica which unfortunately was in poor condition and nothing like the copies you can download from the internet now.  Some of pages were overprinted from the adjacent page, ink migration, and made reading the text very difficult.  Finally he undertook the mighty Das Triumphirende.  It took many months to obtain finished copies of each book and then I had the task of transcribing his handwritten sheest of paper onto my computer, readying it for printing and then finding a method of obtaining finished printed copies.

Mike and I met many times for a beer etc, he enjoyed strong beer with whisky chasers, but not for me, I would have fallen sleep!  We discussed Bessler and his machine and although Mike never believed in Bessler, he did enjoy reading him.

Mike had a degree in 18th century German and spoke German fluently.  He could also recite from memory much ancient Greek literature, also had a degree in Botany and was a permanent freelance researcher for Warwickshire Museum, providing annual reports on the flora of this county.  He was also an avid amateur astronomer and had his own telescope and travelled to witness various eclipses.  He was a regular contributor to one of the top science magazines whose name temporarily escapes me, but I know he was in long running debate on the origin of the universe, string theory and quantum mechanics!  He used to try to explain all this to me but I confess it went clean  over my head.

He was originally a school teacher but got bored repeating himself each year  and said he didn't like kids any way!  So he left to take up his favourite past time which was walking the high ways and byeways of Warwickshire recording all that he saw of a botanical nature.

Latterly he suffered some serious hip problems and had to undergo five hip operations in one year and never really recovered.

I'll miss his great sense of humour and his wonderful laugh; he told some risqué jokes but you could not help but  join in, he was that kind of man.

Please remember Mike, we owe what we know of Bessler's words to him, and to those who seek inaccuracies in his translations, bear in mind he asked me if I wanted something that read well or a literal word for word translation and I chose the former, so Bessler's words carry a flavour of Mike's personal inflections.

Here's to you Mike,

JC

Bessler's Wheel - the World's First Working Perpetual Motion Machine.

While I was away on holiday I got to thinking about Bessler's wheel and how important it could be in the near future.  Then I realised how, over the many years I have researched this subject, that I had become so habituated to thinking of it as a viable machine that I believed that it was just a matter of time before it reappeared as an alternative source of energy.

Then I was reminded forcibly, what an amazing, even stunning, thing it would be if we could reconstruct it and prove all those know-it-all 'experts'  wrong and watch them squirm and wriggle out of their rigid, inflexible mindset!  It isn't as if I hadn't known what a wonderful discovery this would be, but I had become like those above, too accustomed to the idea and subconsciously I 'knew' it was simply a matter of showing them the evidence and the rest would follow.

But of course that isn't the way it will be, but when I finish the wheel,I have some ideas which I hope will drown out the voices of scorn and derision.  But in the mean time I would like to take another brief look at the evidence that supports the conclusion that Bessler's Perpetual motion machine really worked.  So here are the basic facts relating to the wheels and the inventor which led many of us to believe Johann Bessler's wheel was genuine and not a scam.

I'll keep to the most basic facts.  Ok, so all the wheels were demonstrated in front of large crowds.  People were encouraged to examine each wheel and were permitted to to stop and start them, or even slow them down, as often they wished.

The first two wheels would begin to spin as soon as the brake was released.  This ability to begin to spin as soon as they were allowed to do so, showed that the wheels were permanently out-of-balance, even when stationary.  They could only spin in one direction, which seems obvious given that they were always out of balance. 

Due to accusations that the wheels must have been driven by clock-work, Bessler subsequently introduced a different wheel design, which meant it could turn in either direction.  This one needed a gentle push in either direction, from which start it accelerated to its top speed, approximately half that of the one-way wheels.  This was to counter the accusation that the wheels needed winding up.  I suppose that he thought it would prove difficult to produce a wheel which could still be wound up and yet spin in either direction as required by each witness/examiner.

He exhibited in total, four wheels and the last one, another bi-directional version, measured twelve feet in diameter and eighteen inches in thickness.

It could raise a bucket of stones weighing 70 pounds from the castle yard to the roof.  It could drive an archimedes screw for pumping water.  It underwent an endurance test lasting 54 days in a locked and sealed room with a 24 hour guard posted outside.

During the many public examinations, the wheel was set up on one pair of supports started and eventually stopped at which point it was carried across to a second set of supports.  Both sets of supports were thoroughly examined before and after and no sign of fraud was discovered.  The tapered bearings at each end of the six foot axle were just three quarter of an  inch in thickness. Each bearing shell was open for inspection.

During a period of approximately twelve years the various wheels were examined by numerous people, among them royalty, scientists, sceptics, professors, engineers and politicians.  No single case exists of anyone anywhere finding how Bessler did it.

But one man was allowed to see the interior of the wheel, under a strict oath that he could never reveal the secret.  His name was Karl, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, a famous and highly respected man, whose castle at Kassel was where the final wheel was displayed.  He demanded access to the secret as a condition that he provided Bessler with a place to exhibit the wheel.  He was a keen amateur scientist and had already had a history of sponsoring the steam experiments of Denis Papin and he was not prepared to be misled by a swindling con artist.  That is why he insisted on seeing for his own eyes how the machine worked.

Gottfreid Leibniz the famous scientist, philosopher, historian, engineer, and designer of the calculating machine  among many other inventions  - literally a polymath - was at first sceptical of Bessler's clams, but gradually through some extended communications between others who had seen the machine in action, and his own two lengthy and thorough examinations of the machine became convinced of Bessler's sincerity.

It was he who suggestd the number of tests that Bessler needed to arrange in order to convince the sceptics without exposing the machine's interior.

It is worth mentioning that if Bessler had been discovered behaving fraudulently he had a very good chance of being beheaded.  No prince of that time would ever allow such a crime to go unpunished and there are many examples available to support this conclusion.  In his younger days as a miltary leader, Karl exerted the strictest discipline upon his troops and execution was used where he felt it necessary.

But what of Bessler himself?  Was there any indication in his actions that might have suggested an intention to defraud his patron or his public?  He published three items all of which extolled the virtues of his machine, and explaining that it was for sale for £20,000; the same figure as offered by the British Board of Longitude which was set up to find a reliable way of estimating a ship's longitudinal position at sea, and arguably a more valuable invention.  These publications contain information about the inventor's search for the secret of perpetual motion and how he strived to overcome the scornful dismissal of his self-imposed task.  He also stated that if he failed to sell his secret then he would die content in the knowledge that he would be acknowledged post humously - this is not the action of a fraudster.  It also implies that there was or would be information available after his death which would provide vindication for his claim.

He declares in one booklet, Apologia Poetica, that those who wish to know the secret of his machine should examine the book closely.  The book contains an obviously coded section, plus other apparent pieces of code, all of which when combined with other features in the two other booklets each strongly suggestive of additional coded information.

As I have said previously, I have made considerable progress in deciphering one particular type of code and have sufficient information to design and build one of Bessler's wheels.  I hope to complete this in the next few weeks or months and also publish the decoded information.

JC

Update for June 2017

Returned from a few days in Spain where I went for some warmer weather,  just as the UK weather finally improved!  90 degrees in both countries at the same time!  Now I'm back and the weather here has returned to its normal grey skies etc.  Ah well, Spain was wonderful as usual so no regrets.

I've put two black boards in my new workshop which I'm using for drawing ideas, calculations and notes.  I know it's an old fashioned method, these days it's white boards, but I made my black boards for pennies and I'm too tight to pay for a piece of plastic for which they charge pounds!

I'm still working on finishing documenting all the clues I've used to accomplish the reconstruction of Bessler's wheel. On that subject I can say that when the wheel works it will be identical in concept and design to Bessler's.  Many people have argued that we can never know if it is the same as Bessler's, but in fact Bessler stated that the information was there for those who were prepared to look, well I have looked and I have found it. 

Elsewhere I read that it is estimated that nearly 1.3 billion people do not have access to electricity, in addition, around 3 billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and simple stoves burning biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal. Plus, over 4 million people die prematurely every year as a result of illnesses attributable to household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels.

In the past I've talked of irrigation schemes as a useful Bessler wheel  application but I think these alarming figures above seem to me to provide a much better argument for the development of Bessler's wheel as a cheap/free source of energy for all those who do not have access to electricity or cannot afford it.

JC

Climate Change and Bessler's Wheel

I've never been totally convinced by the argument that climate change is due to the effects of pollution, courtesy of the internal combustion engine and other similar pollutants, and not some vagery of nature, but I cannot deny that what ever the case, the fact that it's here is indisputable.  Man-made global warming crisis crusaders are now facing a new threat. Their anti-fossil carbon-based premise for alarmism is being challenged by new scientific evidence of important solar influences upon climate that can't readily be blamed on us. Not that there wasn't lots of good evidence of this before. Actually, there has been, and it has been routinely denigrated and ignored. However, whether it is the former or the latter, does not matter really, we have to do everything possible to try to reverse global warming, even if it we don't see any benefits in our life time.

 Reading about the giant crack in one of Antarctica's largest ice shelves which is about to break off, forming a Delaware-size block of ice brings home the fact of the warming of the earth.The crack in the ice shelf, called Larsen C, has forked toward the Southern Ocean and is growing rapidly and scientists think a glacier behind the ice block could destabilize after the calving event.  This could lead to further disintegration of the remaing shelf. The fact that the ice shelf that has existed for thousands of years and is about to shed a absolutely huge block of ice conjures up the image of vast amounts of fresh water being released into oceans which in time will lead to sea level rises and all the associated disasters that that entails.

 It's at least 1,100 feet thick at the edge — it thickens inland — and covers roughly 2,000 square miles!  So when I read that Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Climate deal because it would cost American jobs I am deeply disappointed.  I always steer clear of politics when writing publicly available pieces because I believe everyone is entitled to their point of view and each views these things from different perspectives, but I hope he renegotiates something of value out of this.  I'm sure that he is thinking short term, at least compared to nature, because he gave commitments which in his mind would be contra to the Paris agreement.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, now is time for Bessler's wheel to make its appearance and no matter how much some people dismiss its potential as an energy provider, I can see a tremendous future for this amazingly simple, basic mechanism which could change the world we live in.. I hope it won't be too late though.  Things need to get moving soon as possible - even if it appeared on the world stage tomorrow, it would still be too late to reverse climate change which, according to the 'experts' has been under way for at least the last 150 years - in other words since we began to pump steam.  If it is indeed down to our own pollution,  and even if there is some lingering doubt about that, surely we should be doing every possible thing to lessen the effect of climate warming, and if that affects the job situation in some countries isn't that better than the losing most of the Eastern Seaboard of the USA where some 40 cities are less than 10 feet above current sea levels and in 20 years they could be inundated.

JC