Would My Book Make A Good Movie?

Another emailer asking me if I am doing anything about getting the book made into a movie, following the Italian docuemntary.  Because I think the story of Bessler would make a good movie, I did some research and this is what I found.

It seems that about half the movies made in Hollywood are adaptations of stories that originally appeared as novels, nonfiction books, comic books, short stories, plays, poems, or what have you. Hollywood studios and production companies aggressively scan major magazines and the lists of New York publishers looking for books and stories that would make good feature films or television shows. If Random House or Harper Collins or some other “major” house published your book, chances are that a professional “reader” has already read your book and written a short memo (called “coverage”) assessing its movie potential. 

If your book was self-published, or published by a smaller press or University press, it’s less likely that a Hollywood “reader” has assessed its movie potential. Hollywood is usually interested in making “big,” popular, commercial movies with wide appeal, so they scan publishers’ lists looking for big, popular commercial books. If your book received unfavorable coverage, or if it was published by an obscure press, then it is unlikely that merely submitting your book to Hollywood studios or talent agents will interest them in its movie potential. Someone (usually you or a producer) will have to show them the movie hidden within the pages of your book, if it’s there.

Given the above state of things I sought information on these professional "readers" and I found that they are difficult if not impossible to contact.  It's easier if you have a contact in the movie business but even then they may not see the story as a movie in the way you can.  Still the best way is the get a literary agen to sell it to a publisher and then let him approach Hollywood.

Ah well, back to the computer and the manuscript.

JC

The Italian Documentary "Moto Perpetuo" is finished and I've seen it.

I have just watched the Orffyreus documentary by FarmStudio Factory and I have to say ...it's brilliant!  They have used virtually all the information from my book, "Perpetual Motion;An Ancient Mystery Solved?" and they have made good use of some ingenious graphics and animations.  It has included some shots of me talking but fortunately they have added a voice-over in Italian so you don't hear me umming and erring!  It is shot in a subtle golden glow which gives it an olden-day nostalgic atmosphere, but there are also some moody shadowy scenes too.  I love the Italian commentary - its poetry! Pity I don't speak it, although I was able to follow it in a vague way.

There are three 'experts' interviewed but I have no idea what they were saying or even if they were in agreement with my own views but it doesn't matter as long as more people become aware of Bessler and his work.

I have suggested that they make a version with English subtitles or possibly with an English voice-over but I think they'll do what they want and probably take no notice of me.  I have a copy of the documentary for my own use but I have signed a document agreeing not to share it with anyone, and I dare not violate our agreement. Even if I did share it, it's in Italian so unless anyone understand it they won't know what's happening.

I'll post something when I know when it's going to be aired.

JC

Spring Inspiration!

I've been asked this question many times - did Bessler use springs in his machine?  My answer has always been the same, in my opinion ...no.  He responds angrily and at length to Wagner's frequent suggestions,that springs were used.  Bessler maintains in no uncertain terms that springs were not used in his machine.  He states in Das Tri.... that "its motion depends neither on an external force or assistance, nor, especially, on any internal clockwork device of wheels and springs."

Consider Bessler's point of view; that particular suggestion coming from Wagner implies that some parts were wound up or clockwork. There is no other use for them that would fit in with what was, after all, a discreet accusation that Bessler was guilty of some fault, offence, or crime.  In my opinion any research involving springs to wind up something in Bessler's wheel is a waste of time, in which case Bessler didn't use springs and he wasn't lying.

Having said that, the use of springs for other purposes is most definitely not ruled out.  I have used them myself to dampen lateral sway in some very long levers I designed for use at one time. They may also be used to lessen the effect of impact in a falling weight or reduce the sound of its fall.  Some have suggested using springs to delay a reaction caused by a falling weight and this may be true although I have not used it in that way.  There are several different designs of springs that Bessler could have made use of.

Springs have been used in locks and padlocks since Roman and Viking times and probably earlier....it is no exaggeration to say that iron or steel springs are vital features of the lock’s technological development. Parts of the mechanisms just don’t work without springs. 

So, a lock spring creates tension – which is usually what the key must displace in order to turn the bolt. Thus, springs store power to perform a task either now or later: pushing forward, holding back or softening a force. Springs have done this kind of work for nearly 2,000 years. 

1. Simple plate spring. About 200 AD until the 17th century.

2. Ward springs. About 100 BC until the 19th century.

3. V-shaped plate springs. About 15th to 17th century.

4. Tumbler with plate spring. About 15th century.

5. Torque springs. About 17th century.

6. Compression springs. About 18th century.

7. Tension springs. About 19th century.

[Thanks again to wikipedia for the above information]

Bessler shows padlocks very clearly in some of his drawings.  They required the presence of certain types of springs which were also used in both organs and guns too!  So Bessler would have been very familiar with their various forms and uses. I thought these shapes might provide inspiration?

JC

"Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?" by John Collins, but not solved by him - yet!

I have received two emails since Christmas berating me for using an ambiguous title for my biography of Johann Bessler.  It seems that I may have given the impression that the book was about my own discovery of the secret of perpetual motion.  Apparently it was thought that the book contained a description of how to build such a machine!  I published this book in 1997, and I must admit that there have been previous such emails over the last few years - maybe one or two a year - and I wonder if this means that others too, have also misread my intention in entitling the book thus, but have refrained from comment.

It was my intention to provide a brief description of the book's content in the title, and in a longer description it would have read as "Did Johann Bessler discover the long-sought-after secret of perpetual motion?".  To me, the inclusion of the question mark at the end of the title showed beyond doubt that I was simply asking the question, had perpetual motion, an ancient mystery, ever been solved? I explained this to the email critics but I don't think they accepted it.  They seemed to think it was some kind of scam designed purely to sell the book on the understanding that the secret lay within the book, so I thought I'd try to clear up any misconceptions.  There is nothing in the book concerning my own work on trying to solve this puzzle, it is a biography about Johann Bessler aka Orffyreus. 

So on to the second reason for this post.  technoguy commented that 'the only problem I had about the book was the end where you go into a gravity "wind" theory of how the wheels worked.'  The truth is the book originally finished before the final chapter but the publisher I did have lined up had requested two things of me; one to reduce the size of the book to 90,000 words - its current length and half its original; and secondly to add a chapter about how it might have worked and what it would mean to people of our time.  It was bound to be highly speculative and if I had my time again I wouldn't have added the last chapter.  Back then I had less idea about how it might be explained.

And finally, an anonymous poster asked what the title of the new book would be?  I had thought something on the lines of "The legened of Bessler's wheel and the Orffyreus Code", but I'm open to suggestions and should the the MS be successfully published and my suggestion of a title be accepted - and it is one that one of you has suggested to me, then due acknowledgement will be included in the acknowledgement section of the book. If there are some acceptable suggestions I'll post them somewhere on the first page of this blog with the author's name attached

JC

Orffyreus' use of Hebrew letters

I was leafing through Bessler's "Der rechtgläubige Orffyreer", http://books.google.co.uk/books and noticed that page 13 has some curious hand-drawn black markings on it which I recognised as, possibly, items from the Hebrew alphabet, which Bessler mentioned in his Apologia Poetica, he learned during his stay in Prague.

A glance at the picture below tells the story.  Bessler has inked in the Hebrew letters between the two parts of the decorative pattern at the head of the page. Below is a piece I copied from the page and in it I have included two examples found on the internet which clearly match what Bessler has written.  He has reproduced the Tetragrammaton, which is what the Jews call the word for their God - Yahwey.

The Tetragrammaton, from Greek  meaning a word having four letters, refers to the name of the God of Israel YHWH used in the Hebrew Bible. Different spellings of the tetragrammaton occur in Jewish magical papyri found in Egypt. One of these forms is the heptagram, These four letters are usually transliterated from Hebrew as IHVH in Latin, JHWH in German, French and Dutch, and JHVH/YHWH in English. This has been variously rendered as "Yahweh" or as "Jehovah", based on the Latin form of the term, while the Hebrew text does not clearly indicate the omitted vowels. It translates most basically as "I am that I am" or "I will be that which I now am".

The Latin pronunciation of the letter I/J as a consonant sound was, the 'y' sound of the English word 'you'. This changed in descendent languages into various stronger consonants, including at one point in French the 'j' sound of the word 'juice', and this was the sound the letter came to be used for in English. Thus the English pronunciation of the older form Jehovah has this 'j' sound, following the English pronunciation of its Latin spelling. In order to preserve the Latin and approximate Hebrew pronunciation of Jahweh, however, the English spelling was changed to Yahweh.

The septagram/heptagram is important in Western Kabbalah, where it symbolizes the sphere of Netzach, the seven planets, the seven alchemical metals, and the seven days of the week.

  [My thanks to Wikipedia for the above information.]

I assume Bessler wished to include the Jewish version of Christianity in his unified Christain religion and he did use the word JEHOVA frequently throughout this document.  This does lend credibility to Bessler's claim that he learned some Hebrew during his stay in Prague.   With reference to the above quote from Wikipeida I should also mention the presence of the heptagram in MT 137 as explained on my web site at www.theorffyreuscode.com - see the four MT 137 links there.

JC

It's my birthday - 67!

I'm 67 today!  I have decided that if I havn't made a working model of Bessler's wheel by the 6th June this year I'll give up trying to build one, and concentrate on finally writing and finishing the follow-up book to the first one which I wrote and published in 1997 - "Perpetual motion - An Ancient Mystery solved?"

I have started and restarted it several times but I kept receiving more information which I tried to include but which didn't really fit in with the lay-out of the first book.  So I am starting again and I'm just going to tell it in chronological order and try to get a published to take it on. I realise that I gave up much to soon in trying to get the first book published.

Louis L’Amour received 200 rejections before Bantam took a chance on him. He is now their best ever selling Author with 330 million sales.

"Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling." A rejection letter sent to Dr Seuss. 300 million sales and the 9th best-selling fiction Author of all time.

"You have no business being a writer and should give up." Zane Grey ignores the advice. His 90 books have now sold 250 million copies.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter was rejected so many times she had to initially self publish. To date: 80 million sales.

"It is so badly written." The Author tries Doubleday instead and his little book makes an impression. The Da Vinci Code sells 80 million.

140 rejections stating "Anthologies don’t sell" until Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen sells 80 million copies.

Having sold only 800 copies on its limited first release, the Author finds a new Publisher and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho sells 75 million.

"We feel that we don’t know the central character well enough." The author does a rewrite and his protagonist becomes an icon for a generation as The Catcher In The Rye sells 65 million.

5 Publishers reject L.M. Montgomery's debut novel. L.C. Page & Company does not, and Anne of Green Gables sells 50 million.

"Nobody will want to read a book about a seagull." Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull went on to sell 44 million copies.

"Undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer." But Jacqueline Susann refuses to give up and her book the Valley of the Dolls sells 30 million.

Margaret Mitchell gets 38 rejections from publishers before finding one to publish her novel Gone With The Wind. Sold 30 million.

I could go on, but the lesson to be learned in publishing is never give up - and I won't!

After that date I shall publish on my web sites and here everything I have worked out regarding the way Bessler's wheel worked and why.

JC

Hypothesis first, then mechanism design

I may be misreading the situation but it seems to me that many people attempting to find a solution to Bessler's wheel are designing new ways of achieving this and they do not realise they are effectively running on the spot,  and I'm not necessarily referring to those who attend this blog but in general.

I read that simulation software is useful because one can test many variations of designs and save hundreds of workshop hours.  While I don't doubt that these variations can be tested quickly and accurately, I think my point is being missed.  I spoke of variations in the design of various parts which occur to you when you are handling the mechanisms, where as the variations being tested in the simulation program really only apply to the changes available to you such as altering the placing of weights, pivot points or dimensions of the parts - it does not mean that the variations being tested in the software will cause an entirely new design to spring to mind just by looking at their animations.

When you have the physical parts in front of you and they don't work, you can see by means of an ability we all have - common sense -  why something doesn't work.  There is no need to run dozens of variations through the simulator when your common sense shows you why it doesn't work, and why no amount of variation in the dimensions or placings of critical parts will improve the outcome.

I often write that I have found and understand the basic concept which drives the gravitywheel, but actually that is too broad a definition.  The basic concept is the actual idea that gravity can drive a wheel continuously through action upon its weights.  All of us who believe this is possible, understand that concept.  So the extra thing that I understand is more than the basic concept.  I understand how it is possible, why it does not conflict with any of the accepted laws of physics, and what the mechanism must do. The key to success for me lies in designing a mechanism that works according to my hypothesis.

So we are looking for a hypothesis initially which will fit within current laws of physics and then all we have to do is design a mechanism which will operate within those laws and fulfil the hypothesis we have thought of. 

So to return to my first point, you must create a hypothesis to explain how the wheel could work and then you can design a mechanism which works according your hypothesis.

JC

Some advice, worth repeating in my opinion - Don't simulate - fabricate!

I know I've mentioned this before here, but from time to time, both by email and through the blog, I'm urged by well-meaning people to test my designs with simulation software, and my response has always been the same; I have tried simulations and I don't get the feedback from it that I do when I build a model, so I don't use them.  For me, there is no substitute for holding the pieces of a mechanism in my hands and, when I find that it isn't working, playing around with it and making all sorts of interesting and new (to me) discoveries.  I enjoyed that experience earlier this January and made, what I think is a momentous discovery and suddenly the so-called 'connectedness principle' was laid bare before me and I understood exactly what Bessler meant.

I am fully aware that there are several people who are equally sure they too understand it, and maybe they do; perhaps we have all made the same discovery... and maybe not.  I would never have made this short leap of understanding using simulation software because I would never have thought of moving the parts in the way I did, and even if I had, I doubt that I would have bothered to go to the trouble of entering that particular variation into the program - and there wasn't just the one variation I tried, but several different ones - who is to say which, if any, I would have tried out in the simulator?  The truth is that you can test variations so much quicker on the work bench than at a computer - and you know that what you are seeing is real and not subject to some bug within the program. Other aspects of the design now find an echo in several different drawings from Bessler and some loose ends have been tied up.

If you have never tried making models to test your design, please try it.  There are many impressive models shown on the besslerwheel forum and I am envious of the skills displayed by their makers but in all honesty there is no need to spend much money to test a hypothesis.  I have often made test mechanisms out of cheap materials such as cardboard, ice-lolly sticks, string, glue, plastic plates, drinking straws, lead weights for curtains and even blutack.  If the test answers the question then you can make something you wouldn't be ashamed of displaying!

I have no idea how many models I've made and if I knew, would I have counted separately all the variations on one design I'd tried?  Bessler suggested he'd made hundreds and I'm sure he did if you include the variations he tried. I would say the same thing - hundreds.

So my advice is, don't depend on just testing the ideas out on simulation programs because you may miss a vital clue if you don't build a model.   I'm sure that the successful machine will be designed by someone who is building models and not by someone who relies on simulation software.

JC

The Italian Orffyreus documentary and the Pentalpha.

RAI, the Italian state owned public service broadcaster who commissioned the "Orffyreus" documentary, have said that FarmStudios cannot send me a DVD of the finished documentary as they don't want anyone outside of production to see it before it's aired, which is fair enough in my opinion. But it does mean that I won't be able to offer copies to anyone for the time being.  Of course should pirated copies appear at some point in the future, then there is nothing one can do about that.  I am to be given a preview in the next few days, so I'll report about it as and when I can.

My current position with the Bessler build is stationary, like the wheels I've built so far!  I've got the flu.  I have a plan mapped out for when I can get back to work and it is looking promising - how many times have I heard myself say that before?  I am still working with the same basic concept which I worked out some eighteen months ago and I'm still convinced that it is the way to go.  It answers all the questions raised and I'm confident it will work.  The mechanisms are complex in a way that would not be obvious to a spectator, such as Karl.  I can see why he described them as simple.  It's one thing to see the finished article and how it works - but quite another to work out how to get it to do what you want it to do, when you don't know the exact design or the dimensions.

In answer to my previous post about the pentagrams and the number 5s, in Bessler's works, I've come to the conclusion he was trying to point us to the alternative word for pentagram, reputedly used by the Pythagorians, which was pentalpha.  Some people think of the pentagram as three interlaced triangles, but others describe it as having five upper case interlocking letter As, and that seem to me to be the more in line with Bessler's thinking. We have seen the interest in the besslerwheel forum in the famous 'A with legs': THE primemover? thread and this supports the idea.

It is well-known that Bessler used alternating letter As throughout his "Maschinen Tractate", sometimes with a straight cross-bar and sometimes with a bent one. He did not do this for any other reason than to point to its importance. I'm sure that this simple lever design is incorporated within the mechanism, and the successful design will require it.  

JC