Future Plan update.

Following the demise of my plan to share all that I have found out about the design of Bessler’s wheel, I have decided a two pronged approach is the way to go.  I am proceeding with my original plan which has always been to build it and publish the results or, should it fail, publish the design anyway.  It might lead to success by someone else, because I know that I have discovered 90% of it, if not the whole thing.  At the same time I will draw up a detailed plan of how the wheel works according to me, and publish it when it's ready!

It might be thought that I could produce and publish such a drawing quite quickly, but I’m not the fastest nor the finest draughts-man on the planet, by any means, and I want it to be clear and understandable.  I may decide to save each part of the graphic build and then run it as a simulation of the build process.  I can’t do an actual simulation but I know there are many people out there who can.

I’m sorry that the sharing of the design and how I found each clue of Bessler’s which led me onward, has foundered on the rocks - but my plan involved some 50 posts and it wasn’t until I had posted about three times that the emails and PMs began to come in and I realised that I had set myself up for an impossible task of responding to each one, sometimes repeating myself several times, and with a growing number of them coming to me.  An excellent response and I’m not complaining, but it proved to be a cumbersome thing to deal with and in the end not necessary.

So once the design is out there, then I can write about the clues and hopefully show that Bessler did intend to leave that information to us for our benefit - and it would show that our design was exactly the same as his, which would answer those who say that we can never know whether our designs are the same as his.

JC

Johann Bessler’s Drawings Hold the Key

It has always seemed to me that the drawings in Das Triumphirende were really rather uninteresting and repetitive.  But I took note of his comments about studying Apologia Poetica, and also at the front of his Maschinen Tractate his suggestion that studying more than one drawing might lead someone to the correct design and thus the solution.  This appeared to refer to the drawings in MT, and perhaps they did, but I wondered if they might also hint at other drawings elsewhere.

If Bessler was serious about leaving the information on how to build his perpetual motion machine to posterity, I never believed mere words would suffice, there had to be that information in one or more drawings.  The hints Bessler left in AP were made many years before the MT had been started so the advice, although added later due to the arrest, is more likely to have referred to those earlier drawings.  I noted several apparent errors in the two drawings of the Merseberg wheel and subsequently found the pentagram which is unarguably present - and the clock which is also self-evidently a deliberate addition.

I explained the clock previously, how it points to the number 55 - 12 x 55 = 660, that being the total of all the numbers labelling the parts, (even after taking into consideration that the number 24 was changed to 42) in both Merseberg drawings. So to cut a long story short I discovered over a very long time what I believe to be Bessler’s  design.

I know that people are impatient to know what I think I’ve discovered or if it is worth anything and I understand that.  I will post everything, but if I just post the design I won’t have shown how and why I arrived at it, and it will look like mere speculation whereas if I can ‘prove’ that each point is derived from a clue within the drawing it might give people more confidence that I’m right.

So the four drawings in Das Triumphirende contain just about all the information you need to build Bessler’s wheel.  The Toys page helps to confirm some details and there are numerous clues all over the place pointing to - dare I say it?  - the numbers 5 and 55.  So today a brief suggestion about that number!

Below is a simple drawing illustrating why five mechanisms are needed.  That is all the room there is.  I’m not saying that it has to be five but I’m sure it is the minimum number.  Alternatives are 7 and 9.  The reason for using odd numbers will become clear in subsequent posts, it is simply a result of the design used and it might be possible using an alternative method to have even numbers of mechanisms.

There is much more to add to the above drawing (using up to about 50 posts!) and it is simply to show why there are five mechanisms in this particular version.

JC

The “great craftsman phrase” interpreted.

What follows is my interpretation of the “great craftsman phrase”.  In his Apologia Poetica, Bessler included many clues, some encoded and some merely ambiguously phrased so that getting the true meaning from each was a struggle.  The one I discuss here is one of the most puzzling, however in the following explanation I hope that the meaning becomes clear.

He wrote, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls a quarter, causes four pounds to shoot upwards four quarters.”  This curious phrase seems on the face of it to be nonsense and yet by picking it apart one can get at the meaning.   What Bessler sought to do was to tell us what to do but disguise it from the casual reader; however it has turned out more difficult than perhaps he anticipated.

Note that within the quote he mentions that there are five weights, one plus four, and each one is equal to one pound.  Secondly, one pound falls a quarter.  How do we define what he meant by a quarter? In this case he was referring to a clock - something he also included in the first drawings in both Grundlicher Bericht and Das Triumphirende - and a quarter of an hour or fifteen minutes covers 90 degrees.  But how could this single right angle fall cause “ four pounds to shoot upwards four quarters”? 

There has been so much discussion about what this brief phrase means, and much puzzlement – and yet once you know what it really means, it is very simple.  We saw in the first part that the word ‘quarter', referred to, not just 90 degrees but also to a clock.  In the second part the word ‘quarter' also refers to a clock but this time he has confused us by using the words ‘four quarters’. ‘Four quarter’s equals ‘one whole hour’.  Each hour on a clock is divided into 30 degrees, so the words ‘four quarters’ meaning ‘one hour’ as used here equals thirty degrees.  To paraphrase Bessler’s words, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls 90 degrees, causes each of the other four pounds to shoot upwards 30 degrees.”  

You might think that that is unremarkable and wouldn't achieve the result we seek, but as with all Bessler information you have to work at it and I have more information to share on this phrase, but at this point I will just say that it is not necessary for the weight being lifted to rise as far as it fell at this point in rotation.

You might also think it would have been better to have said that “one pound falls 90 degrees, causes one pound to shoot upwards 30 degrees”, but that would have removed the information that five weights, and therefore five mechanisms were involved, so it had to be four weights plus the one.  Also do not assume that I am saying that there were only five weights involved, there are more, another five for each of the scissor mechanisms.

This removes the problem of lifting four weights, or just one weight, higher than the same weight falls.

JC

Johann Bessler's so-called Cross-Bars

Each of these code-sharing posts will be simultaneously posted on the www.besslerwheel.com forum as well as here on my blog, so that I have my own record of the posts in this subject.

Each post will contain information I have found in Bessler's books which will hopefully help towards designing the actual mechanisms, and should convince those who believe that Bessler left no information about the actual mechanisms within his wheels, that in fact everything we need can be found if you know where and how to look.

Much has been written about Johann Bessler’s puzzling comment about his use of  cross-bars and I think it’s time I shared what I believe to be the truth about them.

In his Apologia Poetica, on page 71 of part two, he wrote, “If I arrange to have just one cross-bar in the machine, it revolves very slowly, just as if it can hardly turn itself, but on the contrary, when I arrange several cross-bars, pulleys and weights, the machine can revolve much faster, and throw Wagner’s calculations clean out of the window!”

That’s how it appeared in the English translation at the back of my publication of Bessler’s Apologia Poetica.  But a couple of years ago I decided to go back to basics and looked up the word creuze which appears twice in the above quote in the original German.  The word creuze was translated as cross-bar because it was one of dozens of alternative meanings in a huge German/English dictionary I owned, and seemed to be the best fit with Bessler’s description of his mechanism.

But I could not understand how it might be possible to design the wheel with just one cross-bar and it was then that I resolved to check out the whole translation myself.  The word creuze has one obvious equivalent in English and is the basic meaning in German, and it is cross.  There is one obvious place in Bessler’s entire output of mechanical drawings which can be described as a cross and it is in the scissor mechanisms.

The scissor mechanisms is an essential ingredient in the design of the wheel, according to Bessler.  It is obvious when you look at the picture below that the red parts are indeed crosses and in my opinion Bessler is suggesting that one linkage, or cross was scarcely sufficient to turn the wheel but more of them made the wheel turn faster.

The inclusion of the words weights and pulleys along with crosses, suggests that the three items are connected in some way, one of them being the scissor mechanisms.  This solves the puzzle of having “just one cross-bar”, because you could have several crosses on each mechanism.

In a subsequent post I'll show that there were only two X's required, although you can see 8 in the above picture which is from the Toys page in MT, if you include the two handles.  This suggests that more will be better?

You can see from the above single scissor mechanism that one X would provide the minimum  extension.  Two would give more extension.

JC