After 300 Years Bessler’s Wheel is Nigh.

One of the endless problems we face, researching Johann Bessler’s claims to have invented and built a perpetual motion machine, is the reaction of the vast majority of people.  It isn’t just the scientists, teachers, theoreticians, historians and other “experts”; it is ordinary people like ourselves who dismiss with either scorn, humour or irritation our tentative suggestion that Bessler might have been telling the truth.

I have never believed that Bessler’s perpetual motion machine supported itself with an internal closed energy supply and those people who mock us for thinking that, must think we are complete idiots. The definition of perpetual motion has altered somewhat in the intervening 300 plus years but I have always believed that it must have an external energy supply and in my opinion, gravity lies at the root of the energy consumed by Bessler’s wheel. Gravity is the best and probably the only force capable of providing continuous rotation to Bessler’s wheel.

The energy supplied by gravity enables the weights to fall, so some people insist that Bessler’s wheel was gravity-enabled not gravity-driven.  If a wheel can be built and the weights within,  fall due to the effect of gravity, and they are configured in a similar way to those within Bessler’s wheel, resulting in the wheel rotating continuously, then I cannot see anything wrong with calling it a gravity-driven wheel.

There are so many ways we use gravity’s force via some other medium, that to suggest it couldn’t have been done in Bessler’s wheel is just ignoring the evidence that his wheel worked.  I know all the arguments repeated parrot fashion ad nauseam against this subject and I have firmly dismissed them over the last few years.  At the beginning I wasn’t sure, but the more I studied it the more certain I became that I was right. Johann Bessler himself was not entirely happy with the designation, “perpetual motion” for his machine, but could only say that it was propelled by the weights.

I once thought it would be possible to persuade a scientist or professor of the truth of Bessler’s claims, and thence get him to devote time and money to studying Bessler’s wheel and in the end develop a working model.  But the reaction to my efforts was universal.  Fear of failure, fear of peer’s bad reaction, loss of reputation, fear of losing job, fear of not getting another, fear of family recriminations and worst of all, loss of standing in a very reputation conscious society.  I did find a scientist who was very interested but he wanted to see a working proof of principle model, before he committed time and money to its development. Nothing has changed.  We are on our own and even when we succeed there will be doubters and a vicious backlash from the intellectuals, and there are even some who suggest that a planet full of gravity-driven wheels will somehow effect earth’s rotation and stability and doubtless they will join in the clamour of discontent and disbelief.

But no one can argue with working gravity-wheel and once it’s design and method of application have been explained they will all eventually have to concur that they were wrong.

JC

A Vicious Circle and a Virtuous Circle.

Someone commented that using Bessler’s wheel to generate electricity was a medieval method and once the wheel’s concept was understood it could be applied for use with other forces such as gravity.  It made me think about other methods we use today which still relate to an origin first invented in years gone by.

Waterwheels have been used for at least 2500 years and although they are slowly going out of use their basic function to supply energy in some form or other is still being investigated in different ways, for instance tapping tidal energy.

Windmills too, are of ancient lineage, at least 2000 years of age, with similar uses, grinding corn etc. Again they’ve been adapted to produce giant electricity generators but with several disadvantages but they do provide electricity as long as the wind blows, and not too hard!

Steam engines are a relatively new invention, although  their first reference goes back 2000 years to Hero of Alexandria.  But we still use a derivative of the steam engine in our giant electricity generating turbines, most of which still depend on steam to power their mechanical rotation.

Finally there are the weight-driven clocks - not, of course, continuous motion in the way the earlier examples work, but similar in some ways.  The first examples at the beginning of this post all depend upon a supply of energy of some kind.  That energy reveals itself in action, moving water, pressurised steam from heated water,  or wind blowing over the sails of a windmill.

But is there an origin either in history or nature, as there is for the above examples, in Bessler’s wheel? Actually all of them rely on a constant supply of energy and despite what we have been taught so does Bessler’s wheel.  This is usually where we part company with mainstream ideology!

Remember that we are taught that perpetual motion machines were declared axiomatically impossible by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847, because, he declared, no one had ever built one!  An axiom is a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true.  Only Helmholtz did not accept the validity of Bessler’s wheel otherwise the axiom would be demonstrably false.

Most of the above examples obtain their energy from something already in motion and simply draw their energy needs from it.  Wind and water; Bessler’s wheel drew its energy from something in motion too.....weights, falling weights responding to gravity.

I think that no PM machine has revealed itself, other than Bessler’s, because these other kinds of machine were available and more obviously capable of being designed to make use of whatever medium the builders had in mind.  Bessler said that the reason he was successful was that he devoted so much more time and effort in finding the correct principle than anyone else had ever been able do.

Helmholtz  declared that  Perpetual Motion machine’s were impossible because no one  had ever built one.  This is a perfect example of circuitous reasoning and perhaps a literary example of perpetual motion.

Question  - why has no one ever built a perpetual motion machine?

Answer- because Helmholtz says they’re impossible.

Question - why are they impossible?

Answer - because no one has ever built one.

Repeat ad infinitum!

The terms virtuous circle and vicious circle refer to complex chains of events that reinforce themselves through a feedback loop. A virtuous circle has favorable results, while a vicious circle has detrimental results. Bessler's wheel demonstrated a virtuous circle.

JC

Alternative Benefits from Bessler's Wheel?

If Bessler’s wheel should finally materialise and is shown to work due to the effect of gravity on some moveable weights, then we can make a provisional assumption that it might be possible to apply a similar configuration to other conservative forces.

Many here have expressed the opinion that once built Bessler’s wheel would be weak and of limited use.  In my opinion they are wrong and there will be many uses, particularly in third world countries for basic energy generation, irrigation, refrigeration etc.

There is also the potential to creat a reverse system based on the concept behind Bessler's wheel in which a drive is fitted to the reverse design to produce inertial thrust in a particular direction.  There is potential in such a scheme for boats and even space travel. etc.  But there is one more area of science which I think may hold even more potential.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology lead the field in nano energy research.  This complex subject is full of potential uses for nano engineering, but my knowledge is very limited. This quote from an acquaitence at my local university, “Nanotechnology involves the creation and/or manipulation of materials at the nanometre (nm) scale. One nanometre is 10-9 m or one millionth of a millimetre. Nanotechnology is essentially ‘engineering at a very small scale’, and this term can be applied to many areas of research and development – from medicine to manufacturing to computing, and even to textiles and cosmetics”.  Fortunately,  I was talking to someone who used to be a good friend of Mike Senior,  a couple of days ago about my work with Johann Bessler.  This guy is a Professor at Warwick university and it was his idea that if we could prove that Bessler’s wheel worked there were numerous potential applications within the field of nanotechnology.

You can get an idea of the ongoing research by looking at this page

http://www.understandingnano.com/nanotechnology-energy.html

The author lists a number of developments currently being researched and my contact at Warwick University suggested that nano-engineering could make use of the design concept used in Bessler’s wheel.

I cannot confirm or deny the potential but I thought it worth mentioning.  There are people here with far more knowledge and greater intellectual abilities than I have, so I hope perhaps they might comment more knowledgeably than I could?

NB These additional links provided by arktod 1001.

https://imgur.com/a/9Jpin

http://vixra.org/pdf/1512.0276v1.pdf

http://vixra.org/pdf/1404.0097v1.pdf

JC

Simulate or Fabricate?

I moved house two years ago and took the opportunity to throw out most of my old bits and pieces of wheel experiments.  I had hoarded them thinking that I might want to go back at some point to revisit an earlier idea.  But then I realised that after almost 40 years of fabrication I had progressed to the point where I knew instinctively what would or wouldn’t be useful in a new design.  So I bought in new material and once I had my workshop up and running, earlier this year, I set to with renewed enthusiasm to build my latesy version of Bessler's wheel..

And that is my point; I have tinkered with simulations from time to time but have never had the same feedback that I get from actually handling the piecwes, and have dismissed them as a waste of time. Making parts, manipulating them, finding that sometimes they don’t work as you expected, or discovering new movements in the process, or  they inspire new thoughts and designs - you cannot beat actually building the wheels.  It generates enthusiasm for new designs - well it does for me.  BTW, I cannot imagine anyone who is not an incurable optimist ever solving this puzzle.  You need a 100 per cent positive attitude to find the answer.

The design I’m building has been more or less complete in my mind for a couple of years and I am sure that it would be difficult to build a simulation so an actual build is the best thing and anyway you would need to build it eventually just to prove you were right.  Maybe the simulation might indicate that it would not work because of some simple error in the input or the settings.

I’ve seen any number of comments about problems with a simulation and I simply don’t trust them. I’m sure that an expensive simulation software could predict the correct solution, but these off-the-shelf versions seem to me to be full of glitches and are not to be trusted.

Returning to my own build, I set out the design parameters and copied them onto the backboard (the wooden disc which will hold all the parts) and drilled the necessary holes in exactly the right places. I fitted the levers on their swivel posts.  The levers were precisely the correct length.....but when I manually rotated them, two of them touched two adjoining levers, interfering with their actions. Admittedly space was tight and I could have planned for them to have more room, but it is surprising how hard you try for extreme accuracy you can still overlook some small discrepancy in the position of for instance a swivel post.

In fact the accuracy of the positioning of the posts is not vital to success.  A millimetre in any direction would not affect the viability of the design.  So I drilled two new holes and corrected the problem.

It has been often stated that there is only one design that will work,  but is this true? I ask this for two reasons, firstly Bessler said he had several designs which would work, and secondly I am aware of at least one design which apparently works. I have seen the design on paper and I cannot say for sure if it will work, but it seems that a working model was made.  What I can say is that this design is different to mine and I do know that my design is the same as the one Bessler intended to pass on to us. This suggests that there is more than one way to use gravity as an enabler of continuous rotation.

I can see from my own design that it looks possible to create the same effect usng differenr mechanism designs.

So my preference is definitely for fabrication but I know many people swear by simulations and animations. 

JC