Bessler’s Pentagon Rotated.

The pentagon shown in the previous blogs is inverted and concerns have been raised about the evil connotations associated with this figure, so you will doubtless be pleased to discover that perhaps Bessler was also concerned, because he left information about how to rotate it to a more virtuous position, although not necessarily for reasons connected with his soul. 

I’m jumping the gun a bit here but to calm those God fearing souls who are worried about my publishing an inverted pentagram, I am posting some information earlier than I originally intended to.

The Merseburg illustration contains a list of numbered parts. The numbers run from 1 to 24, as was used in the original version of the illustration printed in his first publication Gruendlicher Bericht (GB), but in his later version, the padlock which should be numbered 24 seems to have got its numbers the wrong way round, it reads 42.

For those who think it’s a typo, rest assured, it isn’t. Apart from the fact that printing from a wood block, or woodcut, requires skill and patience and the result is checked throughout to ensure accuracy, the numbers in both illustrations add up to 660 for reasons to be explained shortly, which means that he must have removed a number 18 in the second version to retain the same total, and that is what he did. See the illustration below to see how and why, 

The red line shows the path of the rope as it passes behind the wheel, and also indicates the starting place to obtain the pentagon.  The green line runs from the point on the padlock up to the point where the  top end of the red line crosses the edge of the wheel. The numbers on the padlock need to be rotated to read 24 and the green line should also be rotated 180 degrees.  This rotates the pentagon too.

In the illustration the inverted pentagon is shown in yellow, and the upright one is shown in blue. Notice that it is still slightly tilted to the left, for reasons which will become clear later.

Sorry this is a short blog, but I’m very busy working to finish my wheel.,

NB.  I'm adding a brief explanation of the number anomalies found in the drawings in GB and DT because I did not explain my reasoning in the above blog due to lack of time

Bear in mind that Bessler wanted to provide clues but we have to work at explaining some of them, and he also usually provided more than one way of discovering his intentions.  So here goes:-

In GB the items are numbered from 1 to 24, in DT they are also numbered 1 to 24, plus the lone
number 42. This looks like a simple printing error but of course I have always maintained that
Bessler deliberately introduced such anomalies as clues. I’ll discuss this one later, first we need to
look at some of the features apparent in the numbering.

It becomes quite clear that some of the items are ‘over-numbered’. By that I mean that Bessler
seems to have labelled the parts with a particular number more often than one might think was
necessary. For example the main pillar supporting the wheel is numbered 4, four times. The
slimmer pillars are numbered 12, and two of them to the left are numbered twice each, yet the
other two are only numbered once each. Some numbers appear more often than others and not
just because they are attached to more similar pieces. After number 18 the rest of the numbers are
lone examples. I speculated that this was done to achieve a certain total, and having identified each
part once with its number, he then sought to add to the total by labelling the same parts more than
once. Obviously the higher numbers would make the jumps toward his desired total too big so he
started at the lower end of the range and gradually added numbers until he had achieved his
desired end.

The numbers in GB total 649 and those in DT 633 - not apparently significant, but let’s look more
closely.

In GB there are two number 18’s yet one has been omitted in DT. In GB the number 5 is barely
visible in the box at the bottom of the sideways-on wheel, yet it has clearly been omitted in DT. In
GB the weights at the ends of the pendulums are numbered 11, there are eight of them, yet in DT
one of them has been omitted. Finally in GB there are two number 24’s attached to the padlocks,
yet in DT one of them has been reversed to become 42. Its almost impossible to see but in the first
drawing, GB, the second number 18 is almost invisible, having been squeezed into the small hole
through which the rope is supposed to pass. It is undoubtedly not there in DT. How can we explain
all these anomalies?

The omission of 5 and 18 in DT is explained by the fact that 5 is the most important number to
Bessler because of its connection with the pentagram, and 18 degrees is the basic angle of the
pentagram. Changing the number 24 to 42 can be explained by the omission of 18, because 42 - 24
= 18. He might have done this because of the difficulty of identifying both the the 5 and the second
18 in GB, and this lends credence to the idea that the numbers must add up to something
significant. Of course I have offered an explanation for the reversed numberr 24 in my blog above.

Bessler ensured we got this information by altering the second drawing. First he removed the 5
altogether plus he omitted one of the 11s, and 5 x 11=55. Then he assumed that we would
compare the two drawings and realize that the second one not only omitted these two numbers, but
also when totalled, the numbers add up to 633, and 633 from 649, the total of the numbers in GB,
equalled 16 (or 5 + 11).  As we know, 55 figures abundantly through out Bessler's works.

So, in the first drawing (GB) the numbers, composed from 59 numbers, add up to 649, which is,
interestingly, equal to 59 x 11 (both prime numbers). In the second drawing (DT) the numbers add
up to 633, which is 16 short of the 649. In the second drawing the numbers 5 and one of the 11s
has been omitted, which is why the second drawing does not match the 649 of the first drawing. In
both drawings the picture cuts off the left hand end of the drawing and in the process cuts off one
of the number 11 weights. If, in the first drawing, this is added to the 649 of the first drawing it
produces the number 660, and because we then have 60 numbers, 660 divided by 60 equals 11,
but more interestingly, 660 divided by 12 equals 55! How do we know that he intended us to figure
this out? Because in both drawings there is an additional geometric feature which confirms it. The clock  I described in my blog in 3 September 2016

I had noticed early on that the perspectives used in both drawings ran through the centre of the
main wheel, and I just assumed that this was done from an artistic viewpoint. However I had
already drawn all these lines in by extending them from one side to the other, in the process of
which I noticed that there were twelve lines, marking out the face of a clock. I had wondered if this
was deliberate but now I knew why it had been done. Twelve to six, three to nine, one to seven,
eleven to five and ten to four all followed lines of perspective.

To cinch the argument, the only one that did not, was two to eight o’clock, but interestingly the line
exactly lined up the number eights attached to the weights, and there were two of them. That line
defined the eight o’clock line.

So extending all the perspective lines available to us, which cross in the centre of the wheel,
provides us with a clock face. Using this we can divide up the picture and therefore the numbers by
twelve. To recap, in the first drawing,649 = 59 x 11; add the missing 11, making 660 (60 x 11) the
clock hints at 12, and 660/12=55! In the second drawing we can do the same - 633 + the missing
5 and the 11, plus the other 11 from the left side of the picture = 660. 660 divided by the twelve

equals 55.

I hope this clears up any confusion?

I’ve just added a clearer picture if the GB wheel.




JC

Copyright © 2020 John Collins

The Merseburg Wheel illustration

This is the third decipher blog published early to correct an error in the previous one

In my last blog we looked at the illustration from DT, which I maintain, held a hidden pentagram.  There have been doubts expressed about the figure. Some think it is just a coincidence and any geometric figure could be found, other believe it is badly formed and has unequal chords.

I have placed a corrected pentagram below. Notice where the red line first crosses the lower left rim of the wheel.  Follow the yellow hatching line which begins where the red line first crosses the rim of the wheel, to the right side of the bottom of the main supporting pillar. Next, mark the exact middle of the red line within the circle, and draw a perpendicular line (green) from the centre of rotation upwards through the mark, to the period or full stop on the title line above the drawing.  

The blue line which I included in the previous blog is an error for which apologise.  The illustration I used is just one among many I have, and I used the wrong one!  The pendulum still has its upper almost horizontal chord in the same place and the reason for that will become clear, yes it is deliberate.

In the above illustration the three main columns are numbered 4, but the four supporting ones are numbered 12.  They are of differing heights. The number 12s have two dimensional caps but the 4s have three dimensional ones.  The 12s are designed to act as datum points for an enlarged circle.  See illustration below.

The red circled caps provide reference points for an outer circles which includes the left weight in the main T shaped pendulum, the triangular padlock and part of the chest of stones.  The green circles also provide reference points for an additional confirmation to be described later.  The blue circled caps are not datum points.

Using a set of compasses, place the point on the centre of rotation and set the pencil on the top of one of the two number 12s.  There is room for variation but the important detail is to include the number 11 weight on the left end of the cross bar on the pendulum, and the point on the padlock. The reasons for this will be explained in a later blog.

I will also explain the meaning of the other two (green circled) number 12s in my next blog.

JC

Copyright © 2020 John Collins

Bessler’s Illustrations

Accidentally deleted this one!  Trying to get the comments back.....

Here is the second of my Bessler code interpretations.

The first thing I realised many years ago is that if Bessler was serious about leaving clues for people he would have to use drawings to hide his information. Maschinen Tractate (M.T.) was never published, plus he had left suggestions that answers could be found in both Apologia Poetica (AP) and Das Triumphirende (D.T.)

On the frontispiece of his collection of drawings (M.T.) he scrawled a message, “ NB. May 1, 1733. Due to the arrest, I burned and buried all papers that prove the possibility. However, I have left all demonstrations and experiments, since it would be difficult for anybody to see or learn anything about a perpetual motion from them or to decide whether there was any truth in them because no illustration by itself contains a description of the motion; however, taking various illustrations together and combining them with a discerning mind, it will indeed be possible to look for a movement and, finally to find one in them."

This message has been routinely misunderstood, in my opinion. When he mentions ‘taking various illustrations together’, etc, he is not just talking about the drawings in M.T., he is including the other drawings in GB, AP, and DT. I wrote a blog about this on Wednesday, 15 November 2017, entitled ‘Johann Bessler’s drawings hold the key’. There are other instances where I have pointed out the sources I have found useful in interpreting information among Bessler’s works; one blog dated 8th June 2019 list several other examples.

In the beginning I thought that the illustrations in both Grundlicher Bericht (G.B.) and D.T. were unnecessary. I assumed they were added to make his books a bit more interesting, but then I began to examine them in more detail and discovered the pentagram. The drawing which is from DT has been shown at the top of this blog for a long time.

To save space I shall try to limit the number of drawings I include, and also my interpretation of the clues will be brief as I’ve already almost completed a book about them and I don’t want to repeat that lengthy process with each page.  There are more than fifty clues interpreted and it’s  ok in book form, but there are too many illustrations to post here.  I apologise for this but time is limited and I’m sure you will understand the clues.  I am including some in this blog, see below. This first illustration will turn out to be the most important of all Bessler’s illustrations. It will become a most highly esteemed work of art mixed with mechanical engineering, once people begin to appreciate the huge amount of information which is hidden within. See below.


In the drawing above, the red line follows the path of the rope which passes behind the wheel. A second line, green, is drawn from the centre of the wheel at right angles to the first line. It terminates at the full stop, or period after the second ‘x’ or etc, in the title line at the top of the picture. It grazes the top of one of the pillars numbered 12, and the edge of one of the weights on the left end of the crossbar on the T shaped pendulum. The two ends of the red line and the point on the circumference of the wheel where the green, second line, the perpendicular one, crosses it, mark three of the points of a pentagram. The remaining points, in yellow, are easy to find. Note that the hatching lines on the wheel align with the lower left yellow chord of the pentagram. The blue line crossing from an alignment with the left side pendulum runs through the centre of the wheel and crosses the right side of the wheel to mark another point on the pentagram. The bottom of the main pillar completes the five markers.

The pentagram is not there as a symbol, it is designed to guide you into understanding the construction, but it requires additional help. This help involves the other illustrations in DT, and also there are some vital pieces of information embedded in the text of AP and DT. The Toys page in MT contains what I would describe as back-up clues which can only be seen to fit after you have solved most of the established clues.

More implications of the importance of the number 5 follow



Above are two illustrations demonstrating two ways to find a pentagram in the AP wheel. In addition the three white segments measure 24 degrees, which divides into 360 degrees, 5 times.





In the two drawings above the one on the right is MT137, but the one on the left is a modern version of design by Johann David Heinichen a contemporary of Bessler’s who lived in the same town at the same time, which he invented as an aid for musicians. It was known as a Circle of fifths

JC

Bessler’s Use of the Orffyreus Codes.

I will begin to post Bessler’s clues and my interpretation of them, in my weekly blogs.  As each new blog appears, I will copy and post my previous one in the ‘pages’ which can be accessed at the top of the panel on the right side of the blog. This will provide easy access to each blog-page and none of the ‘pages‘ will have comments, although the blogs themselves will still allow comments, which will save time for anyone who wishes to read the earlier blogs. I’ll add a copyright notice to each of the ones in ‘pages’.

What follows is my take on why Johann Bessler decided to embed numerous clues in his publications, even though no one was supposed to decipher them before the inventor had received payment for his device

When Bessler set out to discover how to design and build a Perpetual Motion (PM) machine, he had read that such a device would be ‘worth a ton of gold’.  But during the long years of research he  also spent time in considering how to actually obtain a large amount of money for the secret of his machine, should he be successful - sound familiar?

His first and over-riding concern was to keep the secret of his wheel’s construction secure, until he had won his ‘ton of gold’.  Once he had constructed his working wheel he approached a number of wealthy persons of high repute, but he would not share his secret for fear of being cheated, which fact prevented him from obtaining documented verification of his claim. Eventually, as we know, he submitted to the demands of Karl, the Landgrave of Hesse and permitted him access to the interior of the wheel, upon the swearing of an oath. Karl verified the machine and Bessler’s claim.

I believe that for many months both before and after his first successful wheel, Bessler planned a publication extolling the virtues of his machine and later a more impressive account of his journey to success.  This was designed to provide a printed back up of his machine’s design which he could call upon as evidence of the priority of his claim, should the need arise, but he embedded the information within a number of clues.

I think he had already decided on placing coded information about the wheel in his books, long before he decided to allow Karl to see how his wheel worked. This would explain why he put so much time and effort into developing and inserting his coded information, even though he had had his claim validated by the highest authority - before Karl verified his claim, his only guarantee that he could prove his priority lay within the coded information.  He seems to have considered the possibility that he might never sell his machine and thus die without ever receiving acknowledgement for his achievement, so it had an additional purpose although not one he would have expected to happen.

He had become familiar with codes during his time in Prague, and had learned much about several different ciphers.  If he needed to pique someone’s interest about the codes in case of illness, death, imprisonment or some other incapacitating event,  he devised a straightforward clue to initiate the curiosity of a knowledgeable person with the right credentials who would wish to dig deeper, and so he adopted the pseudonym, Orffyreus.

This he created from his name, Bessler, using a well-known mono-alphabetic substitution cipher called atbash,  originally used to encrypt the Hebrew alphabet.  The Caesar shift cipher was similar as is the modern algorithm known as ROT13.  The pseudonym was further refined by the addition of two extra forenames, Johann Ernst, in addition to his given name, Elias.  To the curious eye with some knowledge of the atbash cipher, the three initial letters of his forenames, J.E.E., might spark the idea that here was another cipher but this time it was an alphanumeric one.

Initially one can see that E is the fifth letter and J the tenth. I’m aware of the argument that in Bessler’s day the German alphabet consisted of 24 letters rather than 26, but in our case it doesn't affect the findings of the atbash cipher. JEE becomes WRR, using atbash, which does not seem useful, however we know of another cipher in which letters can represent Roman numerals. The letter W if seen as two ‘V’s, can also represent 5 and 5.  But R is either the seventeenth or eighteenth letter of the alphabet, which doesn’t matter because Bessler decided that the atbash equivalent of E was R, which makes R the 18th letter, so he used the 26 letter alphabet.  The reason for this, as we shall discover is that all these numbers are key angles within the pentagram, and 18 is the base number, but more of that later.  The letter ‘R’ also has another role to play, hence it’s inclusion in the Bessler’s logo as seen above.

So Bessler showed his knowledge of several ciphers and implied that he would be using each of them, plus some others which have not yet been deciphered, in his publications.

Bessler created numerous chronograms which were popular at the time.  One chose certain meaningful quotations from the bible, which contained suitable letters within the text that could be read as Roman numerals.  These when added together gave a relevant date. They were often written above the entrance to a building, to provide an establishment date. This technique was also used by the inventor.

Description

The presence of ciphers was meant to inspire someone to search and find and then decipher each clue. But they could not be made too simple in case someone deciphered them too soon, before the inventor got his money. I have no documentary evidence of this but it was said that Bessler requested and was granted permission for a family vault to be built in his garden at Bad Karlshafen. It seems reasonable to assume that this vault might provide pointers to the hidden information and offer some additional help in deciphering them, to aid those who came after his death, looking for clues about his machine. Unfortunately his vault has never been found. But fear not for I have identified enough clues and deciphered enough of them to reconstruct Bessler’s wheel!

I have posted pointers over the years to the places I looked and found and deciphered clues, and I’ll discuss the specific clues which led me to the solution, with illustrations in the future blogs and this will hopefully spur me on finish my construction, which I have to do in order to prove two things; firstly that this wheel is of the same design as a Bessler’s and secondly the clues I’ve found and my interpretation of them is correct.  As I’ve said before, if the wheel fails, I will continue to post my clues because I believe they are correct.

On that point, I have often said that the mechanism is complex and difficult to build, but on the other hand Karl said it was so simple a carpenter's apprentice could build one if he was given time to study it.  It is difficult to build, at least for me.  If you can see a finished product with all parts in their correct place and all the measurements accessible to you, then yes it could be accomplished more easily.  But working from a huge variety of clues which take time to interpret and then you have to build with a certain amount of trial and error, it is not easy.  The concept is easy to understand and perhaps this was the initial action that Bessler found which encouraged him to keep going.  But getting that action without other actions cancelling out any advantage is a little more difficult.  So even when you think you know the secret you’re only half way there.

Please note that there are no suggestions of links with Rosicrucians, FreeMasons, Numerology, Hermeticism,  Kabbalah, or any other cults, religious factions or other weirdness, they are not required to solve the clues.

‘til next time then.

JC