Bessler's windmill and his self-moving wheel.

I have spent several hours of computer time arguing that the wind is a conservative force, like gravity, and yet it can be used to drive windmills, therefore gravity can be used to drive gravitywheels. There have been two chief arguments against this idea but both are easily refuted and I'd prefer not to open that can of worms again here. This time I am approaching the subject from another angle in the hope of persuading some of you to my point of view.

When Bessler left Karl's employment he continued to invent new ways of using his gravity-enabled engine, describing ever-lasting fountains, continuously-playing carillons and even a submarine capable of providing continuous fresh air. All of these clearly depended on the driving force of his self-moving wheel. This fact alone supports the view that he was honest.  But his last invention was potentially a winner, if only he had succeeded in finishing it.  He fell to his death from a new kind of windmill which had a vertical axle and presented its sails to the wind regardless of what ever direction it came from.

The earliest recorded windmill of this design was found to be of Persian origin, and was invented around 500–900 AD. This design was called a panemone, with vertical lightweight wooden sails attached by horizontal struts to a central vertical shaft. It was first built to pump water, and subsequently modified to grind grain as well.  Later the Savonius wind turbine was invented by the Finnish engineer Sigurd Johannes Savonius in 1922.  This design bears a  a surprising similarity to the yin-yang symbol familiar to the Japanese and Chinese.  There are some who support the idea that the yin-yang design originated in ancient times in China where it was originally a windmill very similar to a Savonius windmill,  and which was used for pumping water and grinding corn, and whose design gradually became associated with the religious leaders of that era and subsumed within the Taoist belief system. Certainly it can be argued that the attributes belonging to the yin-yang are similar to the associations applicable to a gravity wheel, as for instance this description, "yin and yang,literally meaning heavy and light, and it is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn in relation to each other. Yin and yang are not opposing forces, but rather complementary ones, that interact to form a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system".   I may say more about this in my next post.

These windmills with their vertical axes present their blades parallel to the wind and reflect the same attitude as gravity does, acting on a gravity-enabled wheel.  It takes but a moment's thought to see that Bessler must have considered the attitude his wheels had to have, in order to take advantage of the downwards force of gravity and he applied the same logic to a windmill to take advantage of the wind.  Unfortunately his desired position on the top of a hill was denied him and it is doubtful if it would have worked where he was forced to build it, lower down in the village of Furstenberg.  It is unclear exactly how his sails were designed although I have posted the only known drawings of it, left to us at my website at http://www.orffyreus.org/  It is possible that drawings exist showing the details of his planned sails and these might give some indication of his design for the gravity-enabled wheels.

Perhaps the design of Johann's gravity wheel gave him the idea of adapting some of its features for use in his new windmill.  This would seem to imply that he also thought of gravity as similar to the force of the wind.  During his years of research we know he studied wind and water mills carefully and must have linked the forces of wind and water to that of gravity and come to the conclusion that they were similarly capable of driving a wheel.

JC

Bessler's Revelation - God or Intuition?

Bessler's belief in God seems to have been a constant theme throughout his life and I wondered at one time if  all his loudly proclaimed faith was genuine, but latter events seem to confirm its validity.

Johann Bessler attributed his success to his own determination to succeed - and more importantly, to God.  This fervent religious belief is something I have tried to understand without success.  I can't help that I'm not a believer, in fact I am an agnostic atheist. One of the  best definitions of such, is that of Robert Flint, in his Croall Lecture of 1887–1888 (published in 1903 under the title Agnosticism).

"The atheist may however be, and not unfrequently is, an agnostic. There is an agnostic atheism or atheistic agnosticism, and the combination of atheism with agnosticism which may be so named is not an uncommon one.

If a man has failed to find any good reason for believing that there is a God, it is perfectly natural and rational that he should not believe that there is a God; and if so, he is an atheist... if he goes farther, and, after an investigation into the nature and reach of human knowledge, ending in the conclusion that the existence of God is incapable of proof, cease to believe in it on the ground that he cannot know it to be true, he is an agnostic and also an atheist – an agnostic-atheist – an atheist because an agnostic... while, then, it is erroneous to identify agnosticism and atheism, it is equally erroneous so to separate them as if the one were exclusive of the other.."

So when Bessler awoke from his strangely invigorating dream which gave him the confidence to carry on to success, he attributed it to God.  He would never have considered that it might have been intuition. Intuition may be defined as "understanding or knowing without conscious recourse to thought, observation or reason. Some see this unmediated process as somehow mystical while others describe intuition as being a response to unconscious cues or implicitly apprehended prior learning."  Dr. Jason Gallate & Ms Shannan Keen BA.

Many, if not all of us, have experienced that moment of revelation in the night or upon waking which seems to provide a light at the end of the tunnel, something which might lead to success or at least progress.  This revelation is, in my opinion, the result of "understanding or knowing without conscious recourse to thought, observation or reason", or to put it another way, the subconscious has continued to worry at the problem and supplied its solution upon waking.  Dreams are often recalled upon waking and yet vanish in the light of a later dawn.  Our subconscious is closer to our waking minds at that moment of transition, when we finally awaken or if we surface momentarily during the night and it is then we can connect, however briefly, with it.

I have no wish to impugn other people's religious convictions, and I have sought to understand them over the years, but in the end one's beliefs are a matter of personal conviction which does not require explanation to anyone else.  To me there is an odd dichotomy between religion and science.  Many top scientists as well as the vast majority of the world's population follow a religion.  But how is it that on the one hand those experts teach us that Bessler's wheel was impossible, because of their rational, objective, non-magical view of the world - and yet on the other hand they state with absolute authority and sincerity their utter belief in the existence of God with no evidence whatsoever other than their subjective experience. Surely two such differing views must be mutually exclusive? How can rational scientists state unequivocally that Bessler's wheel was impossible then go to church on Sunday and 'pray' or talk to a being whose very existence is unknowable.

I read that Science is natural and that:-

• It explains the existence & order of the universe & human consciousness.
• It is rational, fact-based, objective & non-dogmatic.
• It is antithetical to sectarianism, dogmatism, intolerance & violence.
• It does not indulge in magical thinking.
• It deals with human reality, which is the material world.
• It is progressive, evolving as we evolve.
• It is self-correcting, acknowledges its mistakes & moves on.

On the other hand I read that Religion is not only subjective, it’s irrational, and therefore cannot be a source of truth for the following reasons:-

• It was invented by man.
• It misrepresents the origins of man & cosmos and represses human intellect.
• It is irrational, dogmatic, subjective.
• It gives rise to sectarianism, disunity, intolerance, repression & violence.
• It indulges in magical thinking.
• It combines servility & solipsism.
• It represents an anachronistic, Bronze Age philosophy.

And let's not ignore the common man, if he will forgive me for referring to him (or her) thus?  How many believe in ghosts, good luck, superstition, life after death, psychic phenomena etc, etc?  None of these things are proven and yet people would rather believe in some subjective absurdity that they have been persuaded is real than a well documented machine whose only failing was that it appeared to conflict with the laws of science as laid down by those God-fearing men of 300 years ago.

On the other side of the coin, I think there is a strong possibility that those revelations, I mentioned easrlier, that we experience in the night are sometimes proven correct and sometimes turn out to be an example of apophenia.  Remember that definition - the perception of patterns, meanings, or connections where none exists?  Is religion based on seeing patterns where none exist; seeing God's hand in places or events where a more mundane explanation which did not require such divine intervention would suffice.

JC

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Bessler's engine again!

OK this is me day-dreaming again! A while ago I suggested that Bessler's wheel might be used to drive a vehicle of some sort. There was some considerable scoffing at the prospect of a Bessler wheel engine mounted in a vehicle, so I thought I'd better stick my head up above the parapets and risk some more brickbats!

I wonder if Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) who built the first steam engine tramway locomotive, on February 22, 1804, thought that his engine was too big and unwieldy?  It weighed five tons, its boiler was eight foot long and four foot in diameter. It could hit 4 miles an hour BUT it was able to haul a load of 10 tons of iron, 70 men and five extra wagons 9 miles.

In The Guardian Wednesday 26 August 2009

"A century old record has been broken after Inspiration, a twin-finned car that looks like a prop from Thunderbirds, achieved an average speed of 139.84mph on two runs over a measured mile, at Edwards Air Force Base, California. That may not sound fast when a car has already broken the sound barrier, but this was a steam car, and the record for this type of machine was set in 1906, at an average of 127.7mph.

The British car, with British born driver Charles Burnet III at the wheel, reached a maximum of 151.085mph, a speed greater than the 145.6mph recorded in 1985 by Steamin' Demon, a car designed by Jim Crank of California and driven by Richard Barber along the Bonneville Salt Flats."

Coincidentally there is a video of steam-driven vehicles at http://archive.org/details/BeslerCo1932 by the Besler Corporation Promo Film: Steam-Driven Vehicles] (ca. 1932-1933)!

After the 1973 global oil crisis, the Swedish automaker Saab developed an innovative nine-cylinder axial steam-car design that used electronic controls to improve efficiency and reduce the size and weight of the boiler, and added a compressed-air pump to speed up acceleration.  The car used only miniscule amounts of fuel to heat the boiler and generated almost no greenhouse gas emissions. But after the oil market stabilized in the 1980s, the Saab steamer never got off the drawing board. In the 1990s, German researchers came up with a low-emissions engine design, the ZEE, that used ceramic cylinder linings instead of oil as a lubricant. 

The point of the above being that even steam engines can be technologically advanced to compete with the modern petrol engine, so...

OK, I know a steam engine is a more reactive and portable kind of engine than a gravity powered engine seems to be, but don't be so keen to rule out technological advances.  We don't even have a working model of a Besslerwheel yet, and we have no idea of its potential.

I envisage an Besslerwheel engine mounted on gimbals to allow it maintain its vertical axis, what ever direction it is heading and at what ever angle to the horizontal.  Reduce its height and compensate by lengthening it.  In a previous post, I suggested mounting several wheels on one axle, but in fact it might be possible to design it to have one of each weight, whose horizontal length is increased to the length of the wheel's width. So in effect you have squashed down wheel and made it much, much wider.  There may be ways of shaping the weights or altering the levers to gain further mnechanical advantage.

And such an engine might be used to generate electricity to drive the vehicle.

Yes this is pure speculation, but don't dismiss it as a possibility; we won't know what it will be capable of until we have one to develop. 

JC

10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.

Apophenia versus Creativity.

Recently an anonymous commenter used the word 'apophenia', and I had to look it up to learn its meaning.  Thank you for that anon, I am always pleased to learn a new word and 'apophenia' is an excellent example.

'Apophenia' describes the phenomenon of the perception of patterns, meanings, or connections where none exists. It’s like looking at a Rorschach ink blot and telling the analyst what you see.

In the world of statistical analysis, apophenia is known as a "Type 1 error". This is often called the “false positive” and happens when data is interpreted as confirming a hypothesis when in fact it does not. It’s effectively when you see a pattern where there isn’t one.  

The human brain constantly searches for patterns; it's a learned behaviour which developed in response to danger. Patterns are recognised as established order, and breaks in patterns suggest danger.  So although we say we seek patterns what we really do is watch out for breaks in established patterns but the result is the same - we monitor patterns constantly.

We Besslerites are convinced that Johann was genuine, despite what we have been taught and we therefore seek to confirm our belief by reproducing his wheel, not just for that reason but for the benefit of mankind, as we see it. But, as someone put it recently, when you think you might have solved the problem, "the chances are that you are having an apophenic experience and you need to remember to clean your cognitive glasses in a little reality solution."  This sounds rather depressing but actually it isn't.  Looking for the solution involves much trial and error and therefore apophenia is a necessary part of the process.  

We all have our pet theories and each is different to the rest, and we have no way of knowing, so far, if any of them are right, but we seek to prove them by building or simulating the finished wheel, according to whatever hypothesis we are committed to.

Searching for the solution to Bessler's wheel is a bit like connecting the dots to make a recognisable picture.  Sometimes the dots don'tproduce the picture we want.  But have faith, according to Karl Brugger, "The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity ... apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin."  So be creative and let the reality check take care of itself and if the result is attributable to apophenia keep looking for that break in the pattern.

JC

10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.

Update - Frustration leads to innovation!

My wheel project is stationary at the moment for reasons I have explained previously, but things are gradually improving. Unfortunately I am still restricted by lack of space, however this has forced me to concentrate on the most basic requirements for solving this enduring puzzle.  I have built a simple test rig to try to solve the problem currently occupying my mind; how to make the weight fly upwards at the critical moment.

The pictures below give some idea of my working environment!  I'm sharing space with my son-in-law's two bikes, his cross-trainer, his complete tool chest for maintaining his bikes, a fridge-freezer, dishwasher etc etc.  Now they are formally in residence we are trying to make more room, but for now I must just bite the bullet.

I used to have the run of the whole workshop but hopefully things will return to normal at some point earl;y next year!  All my tools and equipment have been crammed into a small corner on the right in the above picture, to allow for the removal of the bikes from time to time.  I can barely turn around in the space left, but I will keep at it because I need the buzz I get from building new mechanisms and testing them to see how they work. 

I had been working with the whole wheel and all its five mechanisms but it is pointless to keep everything in a state of flux when all I need to know is how to get one mechanism to act the way I wish it to.  My test rig is just a simple two foot square of MDF which is painted white and has the critical angles marked out on it.  Certain angles, although apparently necessary to the succesful mechanism have to be omitted from the range of movement for reasons which are clear once you know how the whole thing is meant to work, and they are painted yellow and the critical one to abide by are in red, the rest is as I say, white.  I'm finding this detail  helpful in keeping the design within the limits of my self-imposed strictures which I believe apply to a successful mechanism.

At the moment I'm transferring some parts of the mechanism from the wheel to the test rig and then at every opportunity I return to it and continue my research. I'm certain that once I have achieved the reaction I am looking for I won't need to build the wheel to prove my point because it relates to something I have referred to from time to time and which is secreted in the string of letters I always include after my posts....but of course I will build it!

PS. I know the test rig isn't really an innovation, I just liked the ring of the title!

JC

10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.

The Mystery of the 684 X's in Apologia Poetica

Occasionally I've commented on Bessler's graphic codes, but have generally said little about the non-graphic ones.  But as the subject of the infamous x's scattered throughout Apologia Poetica, came up recently on Besslerwheel forum, I thought I'd update people on my own efforts to extract meaning from them.  I know this is not as interesting as discussing possble mechanical arrangements but there are many people who are still bent on deciphering what Bessler's secret message said.

The mysterious inclusion of 684 x’s scattered in an apparently random fashion at the ends of many of the 7000 plus lines of poetry which compose the Apologia Poetica, has been the subject of some debate.  In fact these x’s are actually abbreviations for the phrase et cetera, and one might think that that is a satisfactory explanation for their presence, but 684 seems an excessive use of the Latin expression and their numbers are reduced to a normal amount, less than ten, in his subsequent book, Das Triumphirende.  The presence of 28 &c's in addition to the et ceteras used, would seem to make the necessity of using the Latin abbreviation redundant, anyway.

The presence of so many et ceteras and the various hints at the existence of a hidden message within the Apologia Poetica lead one inevitably to question the large number of these abbreviations.  In some cases there are as many as seven consecutive lines each ending in the Latin expression.

There are 397 et ceteras in part one of Apologia Poetica, and 287 in part two, totalling 684.  I have omitted the  &c's and the many NB’s and NB’s because I am uncertain about their relevance to a secret message.  But just for the record there are 9 + 19 = 28  &c’s, and 20 + 176 = 196 NB’s. Anyway in preparation for devising his code, Bessler must have written his text and then looked for a way to hide it within his existing work.  I assumed that he then circled or underlined the letters or words he sought for his text and then used some method to identify the line containing that letter or word.  I suggest that he marked this line by placing the et cetera sign at the end of it. There is no mileage, in my opinion, in trying to read something in the positioniong of these abbreviations, either from the front or the back of the page; their positioning is too similar to each other for any one to detect any subtle differences.

The next step was to leave some means of guiding us to the correct letter or word on that line. I tried various ways of identifying a letter or word, but came to the conclusion that a letter was too time consuming and as he had a plethora of suitable words to pick from, why make his job more difficult if he could use full words and still hide them.  If one assumes an average of five letters per word then from a total of 684 ‘et ceteras’, he had about 137 words to complete his secret message, whereas if each et cetera indicated a whole word he would have potentially 684!  I suspect the answer lies somewhere between those two figures.

The method he used to hide his words had to be very strong.  This becomes even more obvious when you consider such passages as this one on page 27 of the Apologia Poetica, which has no fewer than six consecutive lines with the et cetera 'X' at the end.

If each lines contained a word from his text in the order in which it naturally ocurred, it would not take long to find the identifier and hence the whole coded message could be read. And that is not the only page containing six or more consecutive lines with  et ceteras at their ends.  An additional clue may be found in the presence of double et ceteras which appear in part two of Apologia Poetica. Here are a couple below:-

Note the second one is positioned just after two blanks.  The missing word is ‘Schelmen’ meaning ‘rogue’ or ‘rascall’.  For further information on the use of the blanks visit my web site at www.theorffyreuscode.com

I then wondered if the meaning and even the position of the et ceteras themselves were irrelevant.  Maybe the secret lay in the number of them per page.  If there was just one et cetera on a page, maybe that meant 'line one' held the missing word.  As a check I looked at the title page which has one et cetera on it and assumed ‘one’ et cetera meant line ‘one’.  The first word is ORFFYREI  which looks promising, but then it all goes wrong again.  In the subsequent page with et ceteras on it, nothing else supports this idea.  I tried various alternatives such as counting lines from the top on odd pages and from the bottom on even ones, but no dice.

But consider this, if each page which has one or more et ceteras on it, is meant to hide one complete word, there are potentially 226 words.  That is the number of pages which have et ceteras on them.  I feel that this way lies the solution.  It is too tempting to be drawn into considering the line with the et cetera on it rather than just counting how may X's there are and using that number to find the word.

One more thing might be worth taking into account.  The whole book is written in rhyming couplets except for part of Chapter 55, which I have discussed at www.orffyreus.net - maybe there is some way to assign the number of et ceteras to a couplet?

Good luck to those who are persuing this line of enquiry, and I know there are several, from my email correspondence.

JC

10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.

I was contacted recently by a English journalist, Eve Pearce, who offered to write some content for my websites. I thought it was a good idea but as I am so busy at the moment, I had decided to leave my websites as they are for the time being,  so I offered her a guest spot on my blog to see what comments an 'outsider' would generate. I use the word, 'outsider', not in any pejorative sense, indeed I was delighted with her article, but in the sense that she is not part of our somewhat closed community and she can provide a fresh viewpoint to our research.

Her website is at  http://www.andalemono.com/  and here are some samples of her other work:-

http://www.antarcticconnection.com/blogs/Fiennes/

http://www.greenweddingconsortium.com/green-weddings/how-big-is-your-weddings-carbon-footprint/

http://www.oyetimes.com/lifestyle/homes/29907-is-the-canadian-housing-bubble-about-to

Her article follws:-

Perpetual Motion Machines in Use Today

Critics of Bessler´s Wheel would argue that perpetual motion in such instance would be impossible as it contravenes both the first and second law of thermodynamics; while energy is conserved, the energy of a closed system changes due to the transfer of heat and work between it and its environment and secondly isolated systems move towards thermal equilibrium, where entropy is at its greatest, so thermal energy is unable to be transferred for work. However, while they use their theories as evidence, they forget about the best evidence that we could possibly have for perpetual motion machines - those that are in use around the world today. A number of devices have already been invented that allow us to harness the motion in the environment that can go on indefinitely without any further human input; after all everything everywhere is moving - the Earth, its rivers and seas and the very atoms that everything on the planet is made up from. While the Cox Clock - which uses changes in barometric pressure to keep on running - may only be a relic in a museum, we consider another three devices that are examples of perpetual motion machines and are in use today.

 Atmos clock

 This clock produced in Switzerland by Jaeger-LeCoultre is mechanical, but does not need to be wound. Instead it obtains the energy that it requires to run from changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure in its surrounding environment. The clock contains a mixture of ethyl chloride gas and liquid in an airtight capsule. With a rise in temperature and pressure the mixture expands into a chamber, causing a spring to be compressed; the converse occurs when the temperature or pressure falls. The temperature only needs to change by a very achievable 1C or the pressure by 3mmHg every two days for the clock to continue running. The clock is however helped by an internal environment that is almost friction-free and a torsion pendulum that uses less energy than a standard pendulum would.

 Tidal power generator

 Our high energy usage in our homes and businesses requires the use of vast amounts of gas and electricity. Consequently there has been much development in the renewable energy sector in recent decades, one area of which has been tidal power; the energy from the movement of tides is converted into electricity. Tidal forces are the consequence of changes in gravitational attraction exerted by the Moon as it orbits the Earth; in short its attraction to the seas causes their level to rise and water from the middle of the seas is forced towards the shore. Tides occur consistently as the moon has an unchanging orbit around our planet; this makes tidal power more reliable than sources such as solar or wind power, which can fluctuate significantly. Tidal power can be generated through use of a tidal stream generator, which uses the energy of moving water to drive turbines and then generators. Alternatively a tidal barrage uses the difference between the height of a high and low tide; a dam is used to hold back the water at high tide, allowing its energy to build up, and when released at low tide the energy is used to drive turbines.  There is also potential for the use of dynamic tidal power, which could use the interaction between the kinetic and potential energy in a tide.

 Geothermal power generator

 This renewable energy source relies on the energy released when matter is condensed by gravity. Geothermal power plants use the steam produced by geothermal sources to generate electricity. In dry steam power plants - the original method to harness geothermal energy - the hydrothermal fluids are largely steam, which drives a turbine directly; the knock on effect of which is to drive generators and produce electricity. Flash steam power plants are what are most commonly found today; high temperature fluid is pumped under pressure into a tank at surface level, where it is held at a lower pressure, causing some of the fluid to vaporize, which drives the turbines. In a binary cycle power plant the geothermal water or steam is never in contact with the turbines; instead the geothermal fluid passes with a cooler fluid through a heat exchanger, with the transfer of heat causing the second fluid to evaporate and then drive turbines and a generator Having considered these three devices that are driven by nature, could Bessler's Wheel have worked in a similar way through interaction with its surroundings? This theory was pondered by the mathematician Jean Bernoulli, who proposed that the motion seen in nature could support perpetual motion; rather than labelling machines such as Bessler's Wheel as working under artificial perpetual motion, they could move under combined perpetual motion with the help of nature.