300th anniversary approaching and no sign of success .... so far!

We're almost at the 300th anniversary of Johann Bessler's first exhibition - and I've a feeling it's going to be a bit a damp squib!  No sign of success either here or elsewhere although that may change very soon.  

I'm going away to Spain for a couple of weeks very early on Tuesday morning and I'll have to close the comments facility, but as soon as I get back it will be open again and I'll be back at work on my own wheel, unless of course someone has beaten me to the winning post and published their own working model!  I won't close the comments 'til Monday evening.

There have been a number of people who have said that they will have a working model by the 300th anniversary, myself among them, but I suspect that they won't materialise (mine won't).  My own work has gone well and I think that I have the right design if only roughly, and getting it perfect has proved more difficult than I anticipated.  But as I continue to build, adjust, build and adjust I learn more and more (about how to build a stationary wheel!).  I know that certain people will say I'm just fooling myself and my design will never work (I don't need to name you guys!) but I have something up my sleeve that may astound you once you know.

I'm taking a small computer with me in the hope of finding free wi-fi and I may post something if I can.

So good luck to all of you who are building or designing and I'll see you again soon.

JC

Divide the toys page into five parts.

I feel that the clues I have published may be too subtle for some to accept. This puzzles me, but of course I've had many years to study them and get inside Bessler's mind.  Obviously some people think I may be fooling myself but I have good reasons for thinking the clues are deliberate and real.  I never intended to give anything away when I published the clues and therefore by themselves they may seem unimportant, but I hope to explain why they are helpful in discovering the solution to Bessler's wheel.  I won't publish any more as I shall be away for a two weeks and will have to close the comments facility until my return.  I am taking a small computer with me and if I can find a wifi hotspot somewhere then I'll try to write something.  So, in the mean time....

3 days to go - 7th clue.  The items in the Toys page in MT, numbered 138, 139, 140 and 141, are labelled A, B, C, D and E (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  There is an additional hand-drawn item, a spinning top, which includes in the notes attached to it the number 5 (five again!). You can rather neatly divide the drawing labelled 'A' horizontally into five equal divisions.  You can run the horizontal lines across to the left and find that they match well with item 'B' and further across to the stork's bill/lazy tongs.

It has always seemed clear to me that the items labelled 'A' and 'B' are the same things - and with the five divisions in place, show they are also five repeated versions of items 'C' and 'D'.  'A' is shown with the five mechanical arrangements labelled 'C' and 'D' in an open position, and 'B' is the same but closed.

But item labelled 'E' is also similar - you should think of it as 'C' and 'D' linked together.

In other words, as I said in another post, the drawings are not what they appear to be, at first sight.

One more thing.  I could never understand why Johann Bessler added four numbers to the bottom of the page and I assumed that it was to show which pages he had omitted.  In fact this doesn't make sense because this is the last page and followed on from 137, which would have been the last page before he added the toys page. But four numbers doesn't relate to the five (or six) drawings he labelled, but here's an idea - 138, 139, 140 and 141 totals 558.

JC

Bessler's pendulums are not just pendulums.

Only 5 days to go  -  6th Clue. It seems that my suggestion that the pendulums are more than mere decorations is considered highly doubtful, so I shall have to try to convince the sceptics with some more clues.  I would like to convince most people that the secret lies in "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," - Bessler's words, but I couldn't have put it better myself.  

He published the Merseberg drawing in its original state in 1715, in Grundlicher Bericht, and the MT was not completed with the Toys page until about 1723 and yet in Apologia Poetica, also published in 1715, he had already hinted in quite strong terms that he had left a number of clues behind in case he died before the secret was out.

I'm surprised that I'm having to say this but perhaps I should point out here that the pendulums, as shown in his illustrations, are not to be taken literally, in other words they are not what they appear to be.- that would have been far too obvious  For instance, it's no good calculating their period of swing.  They weren't there as speed limiters or modifiers, but they were inside the wheel, but not in their current form.  If you think about it for a moment you realise that it would have been crazy for Bessler to put anything which was easily read and understood correctly as a clue; it had to be opaque, even to the serious researcher. 

I am not going to add any drawings here, but if you are interested, take a look at the Merseberg wheel illustration in Das Triumphirende.  Two hints here, firstly you all know the main wheel includes a pentagon aligned on the rope that passes behind the wheel, the sloping hatch marks are to help fill in the missing parts for one of the pentagons, of which there are two.  Why is the pentagon important?

The second hint is that there is clear evidence that the wheel facing you should be drawn larger than it is shown. Check out the tops of the two right hand pendulum pillars numbered 12, they're higher than the others for a reason, but the two wheels in the picture are the same height. The enlarged circle includes the outer end of the left side of the horizontal weight and also coincides with the right edge of the picture. I leave it to you to decide how one might make use of this.

More clues in other drawings to follow.

JC

The real purpose of Bessler's pendulums.

Work on my wheel has stopped, currently, due to unexpected developments within my family circle.  I may have to leave things 'til my return from holiday.  Unfortunately I will be away on the 300th anniversary, and because finishing the wheel will be delayed, that means my intention to publish everything will also be delayed, but I will get back to work on it as soon as I can.  

I'm sure there may be some who think I'm welching on my promise to share what I've been working on and in order to try to satisfy those who think that way, I will post a few more clues before I go on holiday.  Upon my return I shall try to finish the document and the video asap and publish both freely.

It has often been said that we won't know if a successful wheel was the same as Bessler's or not.  But I think we will know.  I, for one, have based my design on some drawings he left and it will become very clear which ones.

Johann Bessler left dozens of clues about how his wheel worked and  expected that someone would eventually work out all the clues and make a working wheel.  But there have been mistakes, and incorrect assumptions and mostly a complete dismissal of his clues.

(5th clue)

The commonest error is the belief that his comment on the front of His Maschinen Tractate applied strictly to the drawings it contained.

“N.B. 1st May 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.”

In fact only the toys drawings in MT contains useful information.  There are additional hints in MT137 and in the letters 'A' which he used in MT, and there are hints too in some of the illustration numbers.  The remaining drawings he was referring to are the four which appeared in his Das Triumphirende and of course Grundlicher Bericht and in a small way the one at the end of Apologia Poetica.  These four drawings which contain the infamous pendulums also hold almost everything you will need to build his wheel.

It is a source of continual amazement to me that no one seems to have grasped the real reason for the presence of the pendulums. They are there to help you construct Bessler's wheel as he designed it.  I can't put it more plainly than that.  Now I have suspected this for almost the whole time I've been studying Bessler and I have a feeling that I'm not alone.  I think that the others who, like myself, have suspected the true purpose for the pendulums have kept quiet in the hope that they might succeed through tireless experimentation of the many many variations available using the visible clues.

NOTE

No pendulum was ever described by a witness.

Bessler said that they were required to even out any inconsistencies in the rotation of the wheel, but the truly equable nature of the wheel's rotation was commented on in writing more than once.

I suggested that the pendulums were there to make the rather dull illustrations more interesting, but even as I wrote that I in 1997 I was already convinced that the true reason was so that someone "with a discerning mind etc etc."

I have other clues of a more specific nature concerning the drawings which I will post in the next few days.

PS There is a copyright notice at the bottom of the page but I have no objection to these pages being commented on elsewhere and the material copied and pasted as long as proper acknowledgemetn to me is given.  A reference such as  http://johncollinsnews.blogspot.co.uk/   will suffice.

JC

Gravitywheel - Catch 22?

I note recent comments suggesting that all designs should be shared, so others can study them and build and experiment with them.  I have promised to share mine if the wheel works or fails, but in my experience designs are dismissed by the majority and maintaining that you are right only leads to calls for a proof of principle wheel - is that a catch 22 situation?  Design is ignored without a PoP model but you can't build a PoP model unless you have the correct design.

The definition of catch 22 in the book of that name (Joseph McLennan) is "a situation in which a person is frustrated by a paradoxical rule or set of circumstances that preclude any attempt to escape from them".  

Now that has a familiar ring to it.  Our situation requires us to build a wheel which uses the force of gravity to move a number of weights causing a wheel to rotate continuously.  Unfortunately we are frustrated by the paradoxical rules which say that what we wish to achieve is impossible, even though it has been done before.

"Begging the question" is a type of logical fallacy in which a proposition is made that uses its own premise as proof of the proposition. In other words, it is a statement that refers to its own assertion to prove the assertion.  I think it was Helmholtz who said that perpetual motion machines must be impossible because  no-one had ever succeeded in building one that worked. Therefore, such machines must be impossible. If they are impossible it must be by reason of some natural law preventing their construction. This law, he said, could only be the law of Conservation of Energy.  That is also, ironically, a circular argument.

JC

'I found the solution where every other intelligent person looked.'

The Third clue expanded upon.

Bessler said in Apologia Poetica, "These foolish ravings of my enemies will be held up to total ridicule by all intelligent people, who, with true understanding, have sought the Mobile in a place no different from that in which I eventually found it."

I would paraphrase the above and reduce it, as 'the words of my enemies will be ridiculed by all clever people who have already looked for the solution where I found it.'  Or to put it another way, 'I found the solution where every other intelligent person looked.'

I described this a clue, but it seems almost no clue at all, it is so innocuously presented.  Bessler must have had a piece of information in mind when he wrote the sentence, so what would he have found useful for his wheel in the previous designs which had never worked?  What possible feature might he have been able to take advantage of?  The most obvious fact is that the wheels did not rotate. Regardless of how the weights were arranged and could move, the wheels remained stationary.  How might he have found the answer with that knowledge?

JC 

Gravity, gravity - all you need is gravity!

This isn't really a clue, it's just common sense.

If you are one of those who, like myself, believe that Bessler told the truth then you will know that what follows is demonstrably true.  Whether you include two, three, four or five weights or more, on your overbalancing wheel you will have discovered that it still ends up with the wheel in perfect balance, stationary.  When the wheel comes to rest it will have either a single weight at six o’clock, or a pair of weights on either side of six o’clock.  That is a fact.

The problem lies in the design.  If it requires that gravity makes the weight move from the inner orbit to the outer orbit, thus inducing overbalancing and limited rotation, the wheel will come to a stop after a brief rotation.  If you want to make an overbalancing wheel spin continuously, then yes, you must  arrange for the weight to fall into an outer orbit on one side of the wheel... then you have to find a way to lift each weight back up to its original position at least once during each rotation so that it can fall again.  You don't have a choice. It simply won’t work if you design it so that the weights only move outwards, under the influence of gravity, as the wheel turns.  It is not enough to think that the fallen weight will be raised as the wheel turns and somehow fall inwards again at some point. You need an additional force to lift the weight, or move it back inwards again - Bessler didn't exactly say so, but he implied that that additional force was also gravity too - but a separate packet of it.

JC

One bit of work done by gravity, is one packet of energy used.

I have been asked to clarify what I mean by the phrase, 'a packet of energy' used on my website at http://www.besslerswheel.com/html/conservative_force.html

If I drop a book on the floor I say that its fall has consumed one packet of  gravitational energy.  If I drop two books on the floor at the same time there will still be only one packet of energy used, but if the two books drop one after the other then two packets of energy have been used.  If a very heavy dictionary and small pocket diary fall at the same time only one packet of energy has been used.  So the number of packets of energy used depends purely on whether they happened to fall  together or separately.

If I drop a bag of billiard balls on the floor, I can calculate how much energy was used by weighing the bag of balls and measuring how far they fell -  weight times vertical fall gives us a figure indicating the work done by gravity.  I could also weigh the bag and each ball separately and work out how much work was done for each item.  If I then added those figures together the resulting total would be the same as for the bag of balls. So it doesn’t matter how far they fell or how heavy they were - all we are interested in knowing is whether they fell together or separately and that is why I call the amount of work done by gravity, a packet of energy consumed.

The reason I use this phrase is to try to explain how one half of a pair of weights can move the other half without coming into conflict with the conservative nature of gravity. Their falls do not happen at the same time and therefore their new positions can be used advantageously to rotate the wheel.!

I realize of course that this phrase is normally used in connection with photons or gravitons but in this instance there is no direct connection with that concept.

JC

The Bessler-Collins gravitywheel.

There was a comment on here and I've had some emails asking me why my wheel is taking so long.  People have said that it sounded very complex - maybe too complex to be similar to Bessler's wheel.  So with only 21 days left 'til the 300th anniversary I'm sharing some of the details of its build although I doubt you will find it very illuminating - it's not meant to be - yet!

I think I shall finish it in time but I'm not quite there yet.  I am committed to being away for a couple of weeks at the beginning of June so I may save the result 'til I return - or I may not - it probably depends on whether it works or not!  I'm disappointed to be away on the very day we should be remembering Bessler's first exhibition but it can't be helped. Families make arrangements without considering the possibility that they might clash with an important date in my Bessler calendar!

The backplate on which it's all mounted is three feet wide.  There are five mechanisms for reasons I understand but which are not immediately obvious at first sight.  Each mechanism has ten parts plus two weights, so in total the whole wheel has 60 parts, plus the axle.  I wish it had eleven parts per mechanism then it would total 55!

The axle runs all the way through the wheel - for those who have suggested that it didn't.  The mechanisms employ the 'kiiking' principle and the wheel is designed to turn in one direction only.

There are no springs employed in my version although I could find a use for them if required, but the scissor linkage otherwise known as "stork's bill", or" lazy tongs" is present.

The method of working is readily apparent to a casual observer however longer study would be necessary to appreciate the finer points of detail without which it would fail.  If it works, the wheel will begin to spin spontaneously as soon as any brake mechanism that might be applied is released.

The main reason why it has taken so long is that although I had the basic principle, there were some parts of the mechanism whose precise design arrangement was open to interpretation so I had to test each configuration to determine which worked the best.  I have now got the mechanism arrangement I think works best so all I have to do is complete all five and test the wheel. 

I'm convinced that even if it doesn't work the principle is sound and will lead to someone succeeding in making a working wheel. Watch this space.

JC