Belief is not knowledge. Belief is only what you accept as true.

I was taught that Perpetual Motion machines were a violation of nature's laws and therefore impossible. Later I discovered there were various interpretations of what a perpetual motion machine is, but I understood that the one I was interested in, was a machine that used no additional energy beyond that needed to start it. This was described as a closed system with no access to any energy other than that with which it was started. I was told to imagine a flywheel which was spun up to a high speed after which it just ran and ran - until friction, or work, slowed it down to a stop - why? ... because it had used up all of the bit of energy used to start it and there was no more available. Then I thought, friction or making it do work was like applying the brakes on car that was coasting down hill without the engine on, to bring it to a stop. I considered that the car was made to coast down hill by the force of gravity.

But surely I thought, the energy provided by gravity was constant, continuous (and perpetual as far as we are concerned), and although you could say that it was external to the car, it wasn't just external to the car, it was all around it and in and through it, but however you vieweds it, it was not part of a closed system, and therefore it was available as an enerfy source- so why was it impossible for gravity to drive a wheel ...continuously?

To the title of this blog, I would add, Belief is not knowledge. Belief is only what you accept as true, until you find evidence that it isn't true.  Gravity-driven wheels are impossible, or so I was taught to believe, but then I found evidence that that wasn't true.

It's a strange thing, belief.  There are so many beliefs that appear to conflict with each other, that one must conclude that a lot of them are just plain wrong.  The problem seems to lie in the establishment of a theory which seems to answer the question at the the time.  Assumptions that the theory is right, lead to additional speculations which appear proven when based on the originating theory.  But suppose the original theory is right but doesn't encompass all possibilities, or the originator simply did not consider suffiently other potential effects?  This in my opinion is the case with the gravity-wheel.  There is a way in which no law is violated and no dramatic reconsideration of the laws of physics necessary, that allows Bessler's wheel to operate quite legitimately without recourse to such theatrical conclusions.  It's another case for occam's razor, it's the simplest exlanation.

I believe this is so and that it is the only way to explain Bessler's wheel in a way that satifies the scientific experts as well as those of us who know beyond a shadow of doubt that Johann Bessler's claims were genuine.

JC

 

Bessler's dilemma.

While I was writing the "Look Before You Leap" blog, I paused occasionally to ponder upon Bessler's dilemma, i.e., how to get paid for his secret without giving it away.

I remember professor Hal Puthoff suggesting to me once, that he had a number of interested parties who would like to have a chance of investing in the wheel, should someone finally succeed.  This was several years ago now, but at that time, it got me thinking about what I would do in that situation.  Advice I received was that the buyer could not be allowed to examine the wheel to verify my claims for it, because no one could be certain that he would not just walk away and replicate it, leaving me with nothing but egg on my face and empty pockets! This advice was not intended to cast any doubts on Hal's integrity and I completely trusted him then, as now, but I could see what they meant - how could someone be found who had sufficient knowledge to know if I was trying to fool him and at the same time, how could I know if he was planning to steal the design for himself or to sell on?.

It was suggested that any money agreed for the sale should be held in escrow by a disinterested third party pending verification of the claims and only once they had been substantiated, only then would the money be released. Coincidentally this is exactly what Daniel Schumacher proposed to Bessler on behalf of the Russian Czar, Peter the Great, who was intending to buy the wheel.  Bessler rejected the suggestion outright because the same problem applied then, the verifier might be no safer than the buyer.  He said there was only one way forward; the buyer must put a bag containing all the cash agreed, on the table next to the wheel; and the two parties could then go their separate ways, Bessler with his payment and the other with the wheel.

That sounds highly mercenary and harsh and yet what other way was there open to him, given the lack of a patent process.  He was not prepared to let anyone see the inside of the wheel unless the cash was literally on the table.  Since he trusted no one and no one trusted him - impasse!

Of course this need not happen today, any more than it need not have happened in Bessler's day.  All he had to do was give it away, but for what? Kudos? Kudos was not sufficient for his needs nor for his ambitions.

Today one could give the secret away and perhaps it might provide sufficient finances for future needs, and that is probably the best way, but poor old Bessler was in an impossible situation and that is why he sought out Princes and other rulers who had the wealth and power to satisfy his demands, if only he could find one he could actually trust.  Karl the Landgrave of Hesse could have been that man but he had his own requirements and Bessler's wheel did not satisfy them.

JC

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The Six Drawings which hold the Key to Bessler's Wheel.

I mentioned in a recent blog, that I had the solution to Bessler's wheel and that I had obtained the actual design of the mechanism from some of Johann Bessler's drawings.  This provoked the inevitable question, "which particular drawings were they?"  

I responded by suggesting that I would publish that information soon in one of my blogs. At that time. a few days ago, I was secure in the knowledge that I had the actual principle upon which the solution was based, and that without knowledge of it, the drawings, or I should say, illustrations, could not be of much help in trying to putting it all together to arrive at a meaningful solution.  Well of course now that I am persuaded to put my money where my mouth is, I am fearful that cleverer minds than mine may well deduce the answer with greater ease than my  lifetime's study has!  Yes it has taken most of the thirty or so years of building models which resolutely refused to move before I was able to apply the correct principle and move towards what I believe will be a successful conclusion.

The path that most have followed seems to be indicated by Bessler with these words on the front of the document we call Maschinen Tractate (MT):-

"N.B. 1st May, 1733.  Due to the arrest, I burned or hid all the woodcuts 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'. "

I have embolden the critical words.  Firstly you need more than one drawing, and secondly, as Bessler says it will be possible to find a movement.  For movement you could also mean action as in the path taken, or the way something is moved or how, or the configuration that does what you want it to do.  I am now attempting to use this movement or action and make it relate to the principle I discovered and thereby get a working model.

Now the words quoted above are alway associated with the MT because of their close proximity to the drawings and because he states that some of them, presumably in MT,  have been destroyed or hidden.  He appears to be referring to the MT drawings, but this note was written in 1733, and even 32 years later they had not been published, and we have no knowledge about when they were drawn, maybe before 1733 or maybe later.  Perhaps they did not exist in their entirety in 1733. and one should therefore consider any other drawing to which he might have been alluding.  The only others which the public had access to then, are the ones in Grundlicher Bericht, Das Triumphens and Apologia Poetica.  I would say that without any doubt the answers you seek are to be found in those illustrations and I do include all of them.

I would point out that the binding together of all those documents appears to have been carried out after Bessler's death, judging by the page numbering in a handwriting not similar to Bessler's.  It should be noted that many of the pages are of different sizes and shapes and were reported by one recent witness to have been found in a loose stack and we don't know if all of them should have been included or only some.  The point is that in 1733 they were probably not complete and therefore, for Bessler to suggest to someone who might come across them perhaps subsequent to his arrest, that they held the secret to his wheel, he would surely not be indicating the document that we call Maschinen Tractate, but rather his already published ones.

One of the topics which has engendered discussion is the presence of pendulums in some illustrations.  They seem never to have been present in the actual machines which were examined so closely, otherwise some one would have mentioned them

The reason for the pendulum's presence has always seemed to me to have only one purpose, given that there is no record of anyone ever having actually seen them, other than on paper, -  they were part of a system of clues designed to provide everything needed to reconstruct a wheel. I used to suggest that the clues were there to provide dated evidence that he had discovered the secret before anyone else, giving him priority, but that argument does not stand up because, if some else did make a similar discovery after Bessler, he would sell his machine and thus Bessler's secret would be revealed and even if he was able show that he had discovered the secret before the later claim, proving priority would not earn him a penny in fortune or favour. So the real reason was the one he hinted at in Apologia Poetica, a posthumous recognition would be preferable to just giving the secret away during his life and thus being unable to fulfill his aim of founding a new type of school for trade apprentices.

To sum up, the pendulums are part of the answer but by no means all of it, but each drawing contains more  than one clue giving vital information that must be included in the final successful configuration. Not only must you find the correct configuration from within those six illustrations, , but you will need to put it all together so that it uses the principle of which I have spoken, but be warned, there are endless configurations to be extracted from them and they will lead you up many a blind alley - and I should know!

Finally, you will see that I have apparently discarded the whole of MT, but in fact I haven't, there are some clues there, particularly in the 'Toys' page which coincide with those suggested within the published illustrations.  There are also apparently random links which also have an echo within the same illustrations. There is strong evidence of another kind of coded information within MT and the other publications but I do not have sufficient information about them other than to say that I believe Oystein has made some good progress in identifying these.
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JC

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Look Before You Leap!

It's been a while since I mentioned this subject and I wonder how, or if, people's thoughts have changed.  I know from discussions I have had, that everyone taking part in this field of research, i.e. trying to discover how Bessler made his wheel work and then produce one too, has considered what they would do in the event of success.  What would you do if you succeeded?

There are a number of options and mine are simple but there are still snags and pitfalls along the way for the unwary. I think most people are aware that I wouldn't patent the device, for several reasons that I have discussed elsewhere, and don't wish to rehash here again.  I have the option of publishing my book, and there are other potential income sources so for me the way is clear, and yet there are still things to plan for in the event of success.

Picture the scene - you have just finished the first successful continuously spinning gravity driven wheel for 300 years! Do you rush out and broadcast the news?  (I'm assuming there are no thoughts of patents here.)
Publishing your success should be reserved for later because you don't know who might be planning to copy your device or steal it.  Is that paranoia or just common sense?  There are many desperate people who would love to own your invention so the first thing you should do is photograph it, video it, describe it in writing with drawings - and above all dismantle it, hide it and then arrange to have those backups legally registered with the appropriate persons or systems as applicable. This, so that you have a legal document setting the date of register in stone and thus proving your priority if necessary.  This registering can be achieved without revealing the contents of the package - and it costs a minuscule fraction of the patenting process in both time and money.

Some may say that it doesn't matter how much patenting will cost, as all costs will be repaid a thousand-fold eventually, but I say it does matter and the whole patenting process is fraught with expense, and delay and questions and also the distinct possibility of it being  grabbed by the government and taken out of your hands altogether.

So when do you tell the world about your discovery?  Not until you are ready.  I don't have all the answers but restraining your enthusiasm to spill the beans before you have everything settled, and are confident that you will get some remuneration for all your work seems like a sensible precaution.  If you know of someone who is a creditable scientist, teacher or some other respected member of the community and whom you trust to vet the written description and video evidence before you submit it to the world, that could be useful backup too..  Of course it might be difficult to find someone who will not object to subsequent press harassment.

Many of us sometimes believe we are almost there and have the complete design in our heads and we succumb to the temptation to publicise our conviction that we have the solution ( been there. done that!) but advertising that the wheel is almost complete is like saying that someone is almost pregnant; it is either complete and it works or it doesn't.

Suppose that you broadcast your good news immediately you have success, hold a press conference and tell the world; what do you think will happen?  They will want pictures of the device; videos; detailed descriptions of how it works.  Without these they will simply bring in 'expert's to discuss your ideas and shoot them down and unless you are prepared to reveal everything about the wheel it would be best to remain silent until you are ready.

One more thing - I personally would be unwilling to expose my new baby in its present state - rough and ready is the best I could say of it.  I would make a new version of it in a much more presentable image with nice colours and shiny metal; the original can be kept back for future nostalgic consideration..

Anyone who writes regularly on the besslerwheel forum or has a blog, must continue to post their thoughts , even if they have found the solution, otherwise they might be suspected of hiding the fact that they were just biding their time before revealing their success!  I haven't found it yet - honestly!

Ah well - its good to dream!!  Good luck.

JC

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Gravity loophole and eggs on faces!

Having witnessed a plethora of advice on the Besslerwheel forum from the advocates of the opinion that the likelihood of gravity turning out to be the main driving force for Bessler's wheel is about as likely as the survival of a fart in a cyclone, I can only say that I look forward with unbounded enthusiasm to the day when we can look at all the naysayers, who regard us as naive at best, and say..."We told you so, but you wouldn't listen!"

Somebody described us as "naive" and yet the word  naive describes people who tend to believe in whatever they are told, without questioning whether it is right or wrong. Perhaps the word should be applied to those sceptics instead. How else can you describe their complacency in stating in the strongest possible terms that Bessler's wheel will never be driven by gravity alone?  They state with unparalleled self-satisfaction that such machines are impossible and Bessler was either a fraud or used some additional force to achieve the same result.

Why are the words that Bessler used taken as lies or misleading statement at best?  He states in no uncertain terms that the weights are in themselves, the source of the energy, saying " these weights are themselves the PM device, the ‘essential constituent parts’ which must of necessity continue to exercise their motive force (derived from the PM principle) indefinitely – so long as they keep away from the centre of gravity.  To this end they are enclosed (page 21) in a structure or framework, and co- ordinated in such a way that not only are they prevented from attaining their desired equilibrium or ‘point of rest’, but they must for ever seek it, thereby developing an impressive velocity which is proportional to their mass and to the dimensions of their housing.  This velocity is sufficient for the moving and raising of loads applied to the axis of rotation. "

The above statement is unequivocal and should be taken seriously instead of examined for double or hidden meaning .... or downright lies.

So the only conclusion is that there must be loophole within the accepted laws governing gravity which would allow devices such as a gravity-wheel to work as Bessler described - and there is.  It isn't even a loophole - just an overlooked facet of the subject.  I know it and I can prove it, so if I'm right then all you know-it-all sceptics are about to have egg on your faces.

Loophole;  an ambiguity or inadequacy in the law or a set of rules.

A loophole is an ambiguity in a system, such as a law or security, which can be used to circumvent or otherwise avoid the intent, implied or explicitly stated, of the system. wikipedia

JC

Out of ideas? Cross bars and parametric oscillation?

It may have been noticed that the number and frequency of blogs has sharply diminished of late, and the reasons are several.  Subjects relating to Bessler are getting harder to discuss as the finishing line looms closer.  Writing about the subject without giving away anything about my research limits what comments I can make and it is clear that the Besslerwheel forum is suffering from the same affliction; people are running out of ideas to discuss.  I am also keenly aware that every time I make a statement such as I believe that  I am on the final stretch towards the finish, I sound like every other would-be winner of this race to exhibit the first gravity wheel in 300 years.

I often read comments on the besslerwheel forum which seek to affirm certain suppositions as facts and which I at least know are incorrect.  My problem is that when I know for certain that they are wrong I am unable to make any comment to correct this impression if it relates to anything which might give away the principle which I have discovered lies at the heart of the Bessler wheel.

How do I know with such certainty that they are wrong?  I can best answer this with an example.  It has often been stated with considerable self-assurance that we will never know if the wheel, when the solution is eventually found, will be the same configuration as Bessler's.  I can state with equal certainty that we will know, because I have already found enough evidence to convince everyone that the design lies there for all to see if only they can put the correct clues together.  Remember Bessler's word found written across the first page of Bessler's Maschinen Tractate; 

N.B. 1st May, 1733.  Due to the arrest, I burned or hid all the woodcuts 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'. "

These words are the important ones, as I have said before - 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.

I have found the correct illustrations and have put certain parts of them together to obtain a movement or action that demonstrates the principle.  I found the principle which, by the way, involves parametric oscillation as suggested by Scott many years ago on the forum - and also, independently, by professor Hal Puthoff in private correspondence with me several years ago - from other clues in Bessler's drawings, but I have to say that I discovered the Bessler-Collins principle myself first and then found it confirmed in a drawing by Bessler.

You may say, "where is the wheel then?" which is a fair question and I can only tell you that it is being worked on.  Knowing the principle alone is not sufficient and the delay in finishing it lies in deciding how to arrange just one cross bar or cross or crossing to make the principle work.

Speaking of cross bars,  Creuz, the word used by Bessler, and translated as cross bar, has a multitude of meanings and could refer to clubs, as in playing cards, or sharps as in music, or traverse, or of course the letter X - or it might just refer to the shape of a cross in the design of his mechanisms, but in the end it seems to indicate how many mechanisms he employed.  One was scarcely sufficient to turn the wheel but more worked better.

I shall continue to write blogs but they need more care in presenting my thoughts, given that the solution would be so easy to give away, and - selfishly, I admit - I would like to be the one who succeeds with my own version of Bessler's wheel.  As I've promised before, the work I've done will be published if I can't succeed soon so until then I shall keep reconfiguring the mechanism until it does what I want - or give up!

JC

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Build Update and drilled holes which wander awry!

I'm totally immersed in this project and finding it difficult to take time to write this blog, so apologies if you miss my pearls of wisdom, but I have to finally find a way to finish it - the wheel that is, not the blog!  I shall reappear periodically with another trite piece of literary garbage in a vain attempt to stoke some interest afresh, in the life and legend of Bessler's wheel and my/our attempts to solve the ingenious puzzle he bequeathed to later generations - how to cause a wheel to spin continuously requiring nothing but the force of gravity inplace of fuel.

My wood disc, which I use as a kind of platform for attaching the various bits of mechanism that I devise, has been replaced recently because the old one was in danger of becoming a large wooden circle with nothing inside the rim; this being due to my need to drill numerous holes in incalculabler numbers all over the face of the disc, each of which was designed to hold one of the supporting pivots for the forest of levers bearing weights, which formed the mechanisms, but which was found to be in the wrong place according to the resulting state of frozen immobility.

So I begin work anew using my pristine MDF disc, and have carefully measured the dimensions of the levers and drawn their correct positions on the face of the disc and have begun again to drill those accursed holes which are sometimes driven by some iniquitous urge to move slightly off position, thus preventing the success I so desperately seek.

Just kidding guys!  I have drawn in the angles the levers are intended to follow, the weights are ready and attached to the levers.  I'm making this latest version with the intention of trying it with just one mechanism - or one cross-bar as Bessler put it.  I'm not convinced that it will work with only one and Bessler said in Apologia, "If I arrange to have just one cross-bar in the machine, it revolves very slowly, just as if it can hardly turn itself at all, but, on the contrary, when I arrange several leverss, pulleys and weights, the machine can revolve much faster.."  but it should work sufficiently to prove the principle.

It's so frustrating to know the principle behind the wheel and it's so easy to understand that anyone who learns about it will know with the same certainty as I do that it is the key to success.  I was thinking of calling it the "Bessler-Collins principle of ..." - sorry guys but that would give it away! 

Somebody pointed out that the heading of the blog 13th September, Never, Ever, Give Up.originated from a fragment of a Churchill speech which went like this:-

“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force, never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Who might the enemy be?  Why, the world of sceptics out there who deride our every word.

Anyway back to work and I hope I can give you some good news soon.

JC

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Levers, Weights and Perpetual Motion Wheels

When I began my research into Bessler's wheel, 50 odd years ago (!), I used paper, pencil, ruler compasses and a protractor, not much has changed; I still prefer doing the initial design on paper before recording it on my computer.

My first thoughts were to try to design a way of making the weights keep further from the centre of rotation, or try to get more of them on one side than the other -  and that is pretty well the same thing today - that the vast majority of people try to achieve.

But, as I progressed by trial and error - mainly error - one of the mistakes I made many years ago involved the different effects experienced by a lever with a weight on one end, a pendulum if you like, when attached to a wheel.  I'm sure that most people are aware of this simple phenomenon, but as I still get designs emailed to me which ignore this effect, I thought it useful to describe it here.

A pendulum whether swinging or stationary, applies its weight to the pivot.  In other words, gravity pulls down on the weight and the pull is experienced at the pivot. For the sake of this argument I ignore other pulls experienced by the pendulum when swinging.  One of the typical features of perpetual motion designs includes the use of these weighted levers. 

Consider this; a lever with a weight on one end is attached to a pivot mounted at some place on the wheel, say half way between the centre and the rim.  When the wheel is stationary the pendulum hangs straight down, and its weight is experienced at the pivot.  If the wheel is slowly rotated, the lever remains hanging from the pivot while it counter-rotates relative to the wheel, and the weight of the pendulum is still born by the pivot and felt at that point.

If a stop is placed in the path of the counter-rotating pendulum, and this will inevitably be part of the design, then the pendulum is prevented from further motion relative to the wheel; the pull of weight is no longer experienced at the pivot but is then moved to the position on the wheel occupied by the weight. 

 This means that the pull from the weight has moved across the face of the wheel at the the instant that the pendulum comes up against the stop.

Should the wheel be rotated by hand until the pendulum is able to fall again, its weight during the fall, is negligible because it is in free fall and the pivot does not bear the weight and neither does the wheel, so the wheel has lost that portion of its total weight - until, that is, the weight hangs vertically again from its pivot.

So the position in which the weight is supported, or experienced, and where it affects the wheel, moves between the pivot itself and the weight where ever it happens to be relative to the wheel and, for a brief moment, no weight at all, as it falls.

There are several problems which arise when the design calls for the pendulum to do something which doesn't take into account these features and I'd like to have run through some, but time, space and falling reader attention combine to persuade me otherwise.

Of course this all changes if the falling pendulum is designed to do work as it falls - and that's a whole new can of worms!

I should perhaps have included drawings to illustrate this, but the clock is always against me.

JC

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Bessler's Gera Wheel was moved by modest mechanisms of seemingly simple appearance.

Going by the designs I receive by email, from time to time, I notice that the majority of people have devised fairly complex designs in their efforts to solve Bessler's wheel.  Not complex in the way a petrol engine looks when you see an exploded diagram of one, but more complex than it might need to be.  I think the following points are worth bearing in mind when attempting to solve this conundrum.

Bessler was worried that people would think that the wheel wasn't worth the asking price once they saw how it worked and how simple it was.  He was also concerned that a glimpse of the workings or a careless word uttered, might give away the secret, and Karl, the Landgrave, described the wheel as being extremely simple

The Gera wheel, his first, measured 4.6 feet in diameter and only 4 inches in thickness.  The framework which supported the weights and the levers, or whatever else was contained within the wheel, must have been formed to supply a certain rigidity in order not to deform or break down when rotating.  We have no details on the size of the axle but assuming that it was of a sufficient size to keep the wheel stable and relative to the next thee wheel which were correspondingly larger, I think it must have been about 4 inches thick.

These figures suggest an internal thickness of three to three and a half inches maximum, which does not leave much room for the weights.  I'm sure they weren't as heavy as the ones Christian Wolff described as being about 4 pounds in weight, and they would have to have some room to accomodate an lateral movement. The motion of the wheel was described as being accompanied by scratching and scraping sounds, and this suggests that the levers were rubbing against each other as they moved, or the weights were scraping the internal walls of the wheel.

Finally I remain fairly certain that there were five mechanisms within the wheel for reasons additional to the ones I've described elsewhere and this helps to confirm the basic argument I'm putting forward here, that the solution will be found to be extremely simple and not of a complex design - and the mechanisms took up very little room.  The theory I've been working on for the last eighteen months or so, seems to suggest that although it looks simple there are at least two principles to bear in mind and I've recently found that I can distill the amount of mechanism down to fewer component parts and replicate the action I achieved with a more complex design.  This will, I hope, enable me to fit five of them within the wheel.

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JC

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