John Collins is 70 today!

I'm seventy years of age today and in this year, I'm determined to show a proof of principle wheel or how to configure one - and soon.  I am confident that I have the whole solution and it has only taken me 55 years to get here!

I was about 15 when I first read an account of the legend of Bessler's wheel and I spent much of my youth doodling designs which I now know were way off the mark.  When I was about 30  I came across the same book I had read when I was 15 and it re-inspired me to look again into the mystery of Bessler's wheel. I remembered my own scepticism about the assumption that Bessler was a fraud and why, and I determined to get to the truth.  The book was the famous, 'Oddities', by R.Gould and it has served to re-inspire me over the years.

I sought original documents from all over Europe and the USA.  It took years and even when I had copies I couldn't read any of it because it was mostly in German.  I knew I would eventually get it all translated but I did not realise how expensive a task that was going to be.  In the end I advertised in a local paper for someone who was prepared to translate 18th C. German documents for free.

I had about eight replies and although I gave samples to all the respondents, only one stood out. Mike Senior with degrees in 18th C. German - and ancient Greek, astronomy and botany of all things!  He also reads Latin and can quote verbatim from memory, from the ancient Greek texts - and of course speaks fluent German. He is a member of Mensa and regularly has letters published in various science magazines.  Mike has done all my German translations and when he asked me if I wanted a literal translation or did I prefer something more readable that conveyed the spirit of the what the author was trying to say, I chose the latter.  I never realised at that time how Mike's words would be pored over, criticised and sometimes dismissed as inaccurate.  We had no way of knowing that future researchers would seek out clues from the very words used and perhaps I should have stuck to the literal, but it is what it is.

I'm pleased that so many people around the world now have Bessler's words, drawings, thoughts and clues and I hope that they will soon lead to the solution.  The worst thing would be for his work to be lost and for another 300 years pass before the solution was found again.  I really don't think that is going to happen!

So I'm of going out today with my wife and two daughters to celebrate my 70 years and then tomorrow I shall return (at last) to work on my Besslerwheel and finish it!

JC

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Springs? Not in the way you mean.

Many researchers are convinced that Bessler's wheel contained springs for some undetermined use and I agree that there probably were.  Bessler stated that there were no springs such as are used in clocks and all the usual uses for which his opponents implied.  They suggested that without the springs the wheel would quickly come to a stop.  I have noted many times that Bessler suggests that there might have been springs but they were not crucial to the wheel's operation.

In my own work on this project I have noted that there are situation where a spring could be useful. If you have a lever with a weight on the end and the wheel is rotated by hand to a position where the weighted lever is ready to fall, it has reached what I shall call, the pre-fall position.  At that point you hand-rotate the wheel one or two degrees and the weight falls, right?  But in a real time scenario the wheel is rotating, let us say, under its own steam, or you have given it a push so that it rotates, the weighted lever does not fall just after the same pre-fall position that it did when you hand-turned the wheel.  It goes on for perhaps another 10 or 15 degrees before it grudgingly falls.

In this instance I have placed a weak spring with a fairly long amount of travel in it for the weighted lever to land on and compress.  It is, as I say, very soft and when the wheel and its lever continues to rotate to the next pre-fall position, the inclination for the lever to fall is activated more immediately because the load holding the spring compressed weakens as the lever approaches the pre-fall position, giving  it a little push to bring about the fall.

This fact is due to the wheel's rotation while the lever is about to fall.  When stationary the lever responds to the next incremental degree of rotation and falls; when the wheel is already in rotation the combination of wheel travel and lever-tipping is merged so that the lever is actually falling while its position on the wheel is also falling.

Another way to engender a faster response in the fall of the lever, is to find the pre-fall position first, and then set the lever forward a few degrees so that it begins its fall ahead of the pre-fall point at which its position on the wheel begins to fall.  This does of course limit the amount of travel available for inducing overbalance, but even the smallest difference should be sufficient to overbalance the wheel.

My apologies if this is difficult to explain but it is a genuine problem and solution.  I suggested many years ago that the amount of travel by the weights would  prove to be limited for just this reason. Those who sought success by designing weights to move a maximum amount from inner to outer would be sure to suffer failure in a working model.

As a committed hands-on builder, I am sceptical about simulation software revealing the above facts and so I continue to build.  I am sure that many will jump to the defence of simulation, but I am sure that such niggles will prove invisible unless the input includes such variables.

JC

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Update - I am right and everyone else is wrong?

Having spent three weeks away recently, I was looking forward to returning to work on my latest version of Bessler's wheel, but this intention has been thwarted by several illnesses in my family.  My family comes first so I have managed to spend less than half an hour there, since before the Christmas holidays..  I had hoped to prove my design for my own satisfaction very soon but it looks as though it will have to wait.

This is a little frustrating for me as I wanted to get the model tested before completing it.  How can I test an incomplete model?  I think that if two mechanism work as I predict they will, then the rest is plain sailing.  I just have to complete the other mechanisms.

One of my recurring concerns is reading about other people's theories about what this or that clue meant.  The authors sound so confident and yet when I read about how this or that design is supposed to fit in with this or that clue etc, part of me wants to show them the errors they are making, because I know how it is supposed to work.

I understand that everyone has their own pet theories and there can't be two which apply equally if they are different, so why should mine be any more likely to lead to the correct solution?  I made a major discovery, possibly as long as two years ago now, and yet I have only recently worked out how to apply it and that after several false starts.  I made this important discovery and subsequently found out exactly what Bessler was intending to convey in his various clues.  Finding further support for my conclusions became a matter of rereading everything, relating what I found to the clues themselves. This being so I am unceasingly surprised at claims similar to mine but which are clearly no way the same as mine. I read their explanation and the temptation to show them why they are so far off the correct interpretation is difficult to resist.  But perhaps it is me who has got the wrong end of the stick, or is it the other guy, or are we both wrong?

What I do know, and this is the vaguest of clues, Scott Ellis founder of the Bessler wheel forum put me on the right track many years ago although I did not recognise it until recently.

For what it's worth, I do not find anything of value in designs for Bessler's wheel which include the use of springs, magnets or temperature variations, I am satisfied that it all hangs on gravity and it will be shown that there is no conflict with the laws of physics.  In fact it has to be gravity and it can't break any physical laws.

My feeling is that my understanding is correct and everyone else is wrong.  It’s very hard to be a lone voice in the wilderness, as we all are. It’s difficult to feel, know, and speak your truth and be greeted by either the dull thud of indifference or the resounding bellow of opposition, scorn and even anger.

The way you respond says a lot about your character. Do you fold up, shut down, or otherwise retreat from speaking your truth? Do you fight back until you wear yourself out? Do you try to prove that what you are saying is right, and that what everyone else is saying is wrong? But one thing is clear: if the upstart perpetual motionists prove to be right, and the others were wrong, what a day of celebration!  So despite opposition and competition I shall continue to seek the solution until I succeed.

 May this be an inspiration to you.

JC

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Perpetual Motion in Nature?

It has been suggested many times that the secret to discovering how to make a perpetual motion machine will be found in Nature.  One immediately thinks of gravity, but usually it is thought that that is not what those who expressed such an idea had in mind.  They implied that if examples of perpetual motion did not exist in nature then it wasn't possible. 

They declared that history shows that we (mankind) have found a way of obtaining usable motion from the force of the wind and of moving water etc. but for perpetual motion there had to be another  force available to tap and since all forces were known and already utilised there could be no such device otherwise it would have already been invented.

It has been assumed that they sought some kind of mechanical action in nature.  Examples such as the spinning of a sycamore seed as it falls to earth; the way grass and weeds could force their way up through concrete; the expansion of water as it freezes, breaking glass and pottery utensils; the rising tide lifting boats that were grounded at low tide; the expansion of steam in a boiler.  All these actions and their causes were clearly evident and ways could be found to make use of them, but not gravity apparently.

Yet gravity is a force of nature.  Without it the sycamore seed would not fall;  the tides would not rise and fall.  In fact none of the actions in nature  mentioned above that have been observed have led directly to an invention.  Of course there are examples of single-bladed propellers, not dissimilar to the sycamore seed, but that was not the first design derived from such an idea but was developed for other reasons later in the history of flight.  I doubt that the windmill derived from observation of the effect of the wind on trees and falling leaves.  It is more likely that initially the use of sails on sailing boats  led to the use of windmill sails made of canvas, such as were and are used all over the middle East.  Sails probably developed from seeing sheets of cotton or dyed materials, drying in the wind on lines, So although the action of forces on material things was observed and ways of using them discovered, finding ways of using gravity other than for falling weight clocks, not a continuous process such as was sought, was deemed impossible.

So what Bernouille and Boyle, for instance, were saying, was that we needed to find a force in nature to power the perpetual motion machine; not necessarily a specific mechanical action observed in nature.  Of course perpetual is an ambiguous word; if a machine ran for ten years it would be as good as a perpetual motion machine; a windmill could be described as a perpetual motion machine as long as the wind continued to blow, but neither are perpetual in the literal sense of the word.

It has been assumed that looking for the answer in nature meant finding an example of perpetual motion in action rather than simply an available force such as gravity.  Gravity is obviously that force and is really the only one left to us that might accommodate our aim - and it's entrance into the world of continuous propulsion is imminent.

In describing perpetual motion as being acceptable if it only lasted ten years, I omitted to point to the spinning of our planet earth as a perpetual motion machine, which has been spinning for a lot more than ten years; perpetual motion is all around us and is clearly continuous as far as we are concerned even if ultimately it stops.

JC

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Happy New Year and my Resolution.

I have a very good feeling about this year - I am certain that the solution will be revealed!  That's my new year's resolution to achieve!

I'm working on a slightly smaller model at present because my previous one used levers which were too large and I was unable to build in the fine detail required by the mechanism, which resulted in it being too stiff and ungainly to move easily under gravity.  My current model measures only 3 feet wide, two inches thick, and will weigh about 5 pounds, although that may increase if I need heavier weights.  The levers are thin and light and work much more smoothly

I'm not the best engineer and builder and I'm finding the task quite demanding and I am considering alternative options should my limited expertise be insufficient for the job.  I could call upon someone who is an accomplished engineer and a willing collaborator but unfortunately he lives far away, and I'd prefer to find someone in the England if possible, so that we can work together more easily - some of our discussions may involve adjusting certain details to conform to what I believe is the solution, and this would be difficult to achieve if we were too far apart physically; or I might seek out an accomplished animator so that I could produce a video explaining in detail why the design is as it is and how it works; or perhaps I could share what I have with someone who would be prepared to sign an NDA, and could then take on the task for me.  These are merely options due for consideration if I can't complete this task

But my priority is to try to finish it myself, even if it is not very attractive nor efficient, as long as it does just enough to prove the principle, I shall be content.

So back to the workshop!  I work slowly and intermittently and this means it may be a while before I get to make a decision on my next step, but that is how things stand at the moment.

JC

Merry Christmas and a Happy and Successful New Year!

This may be my last post until after the New Year so I would like to take this opportunity to wish every one a very Happy Christmas and a very prosperous New Year.  I know I say this every year but .... will next year, 2015, be the one in which Bessler's secret is at last discovered?

In 2012 I placed a countdown clock here in the hope it would spur people on to find the solution to Bessler's wheel in time to celebrate the 300th anniversary from its first public exhibition.  We missed it but it doesn't matter if we do it next year instead. 2015 would be a good year to celebrate.  1715 saw the introduction to the world of the Merseburg wheel, the first which could spin of its own accord in either direction thus refuting  the accusation that it was driven by clockwork.   Perhaps a successful wheel in 2015 that would be a fitting 300 year anniversary present?

I am trying to finish my current model before Christmas but things are a bit hectic so it may have to wait 'til next year before I find out if I'm any closer to the finishing line. I'm going to Florida for Christmas and hopefully the weather will be much better than here - how can it not be?! It is so relaxing not to have to run around getting ready for Christmas here, we can just chill out in Florida and enjoy the warmth!  We'll be swimming in the heated pool on Christmas day or possibly sitting in the spa with a glass of something.  

I dreamed the other night that there was a headline in a British newspaper which proclaimed, "70 year old retired British engineer discovers the secret of Perpetual Motion."  What a disappointment when I woke up and realised it was just a dream! I'll be 70 next year and I think it's high time I succeeded. I guess we all have those kind of dreams from time to time and I think they spur us on to try and make it come true.  

So will we succeed in 2015?  Any one of us could be the one and I believe we all want it to happen soon or we'll be too old to enjoy it!

There's  a book I came across the other day entitled "Wrong: Why experts keep failing us" by  David H. Freedman.  His 'experts' are, scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more.  Briefly he describes how, for instance a medical journal might publish the results of a study which indicate a particular finding, which is seized upon by the media and hailed as a triumph of scientific research.  Often only months later other results are published which call into question the original claims.  For reasons unclear these latter publications are ignored or treated as irrelevant and the public advised to dismiss such evidence as unreliable.

These studies were presumably carried out in a rigorous manner and designed to obtain data which  would allow careful analysis and result in the replacement of the conjecture and careless assumptions which had preceded it.  So just because some inconvenient truths emerged there was no need to ditch them in favour of the first one.

This reminds me of the assumptions made by our old friend Hermann von Helmholtz that "the perpetual motion has been demonstrated by experiment to be impossible".  How do you prove an impossibility?

Good luck in 2015!  Remember "Science is a commitment to a belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman.

JC

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"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

There are often comments, both here and on the besslerwheel forum which strive to cast doubt on various pieces of evidence in an attempt to explain away Bessler's achievement.

For instance sometimes it is an accusation that Karl the Landgrave, was somehow implicated in a plot to lend credit to Bessler's claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine, when all the time, it is said, he knew such devices were impossible.  I have presented all the evidence in my book, "Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?", and I have no wish nor room to present it again here, suffice to say, read my book and you will see that Karl had no desire or intention to be involved in such a plot, he was an honourable man and recognised as such and he had too much to lose if he was found to have been taken in by a fraudster.

Another accusation suggests that either the witnesses to the wheel tests were a bunch of gullible fools, or else were participants in the same scam described above.  Again, a read of my book will give details of all the most important and influential observers  present at the examinations and it becomes obvious that they were astute and competent witnesses perfectly capable of making up their own minds about the validity of the tests.  Many of them were determined to prove that Bessler was a fraud but ended up supporting his claim.

One suggestion is that Bessler fooled everyone over a period of more than ten years and none of the witnesses, including Karl, realised that they had been duped and that the whole thing was a fake.  The thing people should ask is, how was that achieved?  How did the wheel keep turning for 54 days and nights in a locked and guarded room, without any means found through which someone (who?) might turn the wheel from an adjoining room (they had all been searched prior to the long test) and leave no trace of their presence?

How did Bessler manage to hide any connection to another room, when he showed the wheel on two separate sets of open bearings mounted on separate pillars, changing positions as often as the examiners requested?   There is much more but despite all the evidence in support of Bessler, I sense a certain desperation in these suggestions of fraud, based on no evidence whatsoever, other than that which we have been taught - that it is impossible.

Because people believe, without a trace of doubt, that a gravity-driven wheel is impossible, they search for another explanation - but there isn't one.  Bessler said that the weights formed the perpetual motion itself and there was no connection to any other source of energy other than that inherent in the weights themselves - their weight.  Even those who believe in Bessler still seek alternative energy sources because they simply cannot accept that gravity alone can be that source.  In his book, Das Triumphirende Bessler spoke clearly about the source of the energy his wheel used and he gave his patron Karl, a copy of the book, and clearly he must have known that the Landgrave might read it and question anything which he found deceitful, fraudulent or inaccurate.  

 "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."   The truth is that gravity will prove to be the energy source and the sooner people realise that and accept it, the sooner the solution will be revealed.

JC

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Intuition and Instinct versus Education and Peer Pressure.

I've been researching and building Bessler's wheel for so long, I no longer consider how extraordinary is the thing I will achieve if and when it works, or anyone else who hopes to be successful, instead of me!  For an extraordinary thing it will be, make no mistake - inventing a machine which requires naught but gravity to feed it!

I understand why the prevailing consensus of opinion rules strongly against such a concept and yet man's instinct is that this   will   work!  It is that same intuition that informed us that a heavier than air machine could fly, when experts predicted it wouldn't.  "Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899. Probably the largest source of wrong predictions today, concern global warming, but I'm not even going there!  On the subject of erroneous scientific predictions, I think that the presumption that gravity-driven machines are impossible will become one of the most famous.

Scientific misconceptions are usually accepted beliefs that were founded on inaccurate arguments that sometimes have little basis in actual scientific fact. Scientific misconceptions can also refer to preconceived notions based on religious or cultural influences. Many scientific misconceptions occur because of faulty teaching styles and the sometimes perplexing nature of true scientific texts. Some topics, like evolution are hamstrung with so much moral interpretation that the truth is rarely revealed and the majority of common knowledge regarding the topic is erroneous.

What is so curious about the Johann Bessler case is that he went to great lengths to prove his claims, improving his wheels, inventing and reinventing new tests to prove that he was not a liar.  All who attended the tests believed him, how could they not?  The evidence was so irrefutable; the tests so conclusive; what else could he have done - other than show the internal workings? But science ignored Bessler's claims and even ignored the word of a man of proven integrity who knew the secret too, confirmed the inventor's claims and supported him.

The key to understanding why it was thought impossible in Bessler's time, lies in the difference between what we mean now by perpetual motion and what they meant 300 years ago.  Because the word gravity, as I have said many many times, simply means heaviness, it was not recognised as a force but rather as an intrinsic feature of all things on earth.  Heaviness did not convey the feeling that one could tap into it as Bessler claimed.  Since it was not separable from the thing having heaviness, how could it be used separately? 

Sir Isaac Newton said that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.  Note that word "force"; in physics a force is any interaction which tends to change the motion of an object.  According to Voltaire, at the time of Newton's death in 1726, even "after 40 years since its publication, his ' Principia' had not 20 readers outside of England", so it is little wonder that any suggestion that gravity might provide the necessary impetus to rotate Bessler's wheel was misunderstood or not believed, and yet Newton himself drew a design for a gravity-driven wheel, so he must have considered the possibility.

So in Bessler's day, perpetual motion meant something which would run continuously without any additional force being added - a closed system.  No wonder the scientists of the day dismissed it; a closed system that needed no energy input and yet kept running and doing work! Perpetual motion as a closed system is pointless, even if it were possible. Today I think of Bessler's wheel, not as a a perpetual motion device, but as something which will run continuously as long as it is fed energy, energy such as the force of gravity, or the energy we obtain from burning fossil fuels in cars, planes and ships.  There is no difference and yet we don't deny those latter devices will run continuously as long as they have fuel to burn and don't break down, but they are not what we understand as perpetual motion machines.  There is of course the small but important detail, can gravity be tapped in the same way that gas can?  Science says no - Bessler says yes!

JC

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Bessler's Wheel could be a powerful Prime Mover.

The question of how much power might be available from Bessler's wheels is often raised and I'd like to argue (again) that those who suggest the wheel may have little useful power are wrong in their assumption.

Bessler's first wheel was only four and a half feet wide by 4 inches thick and he had to respond to the criticism that it was too small to be of any use.  His last two wheels, the Merseberg and the Kassel, measured twelve feet in diameter by one foot, and one and a half foot in thickness, respectively.  The fact that people thought the Gera wheel was too small suggests that they believed that increasing the size would increase its power - a logical assumption and obviously one that Bessler agreed with

The first wheel was a proof of principle one, and probably the largest he could afford to make at the time.  The later, Merseberg wheel, turned at 40 rpm, but the Kassel wheel at only 26 rpm.  Bessler said that he "could make my wheel go really slowly, with a gentle rhythm, and it would still be able to raise even greater weights!"  The Kassel wheel was designed to turn more slowly than the Merseberg one because he wished to arrange for an endurance test of one month at least and there would be less wear on a slower turning wheel and yet it was able to raise the same seventy pound weight despite the slower speed, supporting his claim which was made some three years before the Kassel wheel was built.

In the case of the Merseburg wheel, Professor Christian Wolff commented on the use of pulleys about which he said, "At the moment it can lift a weight of sixty pounds, but to achieve this the pulley had to be reduced more than four times, making the lifting quite slow." The official certificate issued, described the weight as being seventy pounds and no mention was made of the four-fold pulley, I wonder if the reason for the use of the pulleys was to slow down the lift to make it last longer, just to impress.  So perhaps no pulleys were actually necessary?

If we take the Merseburg wheel for example, say the axle was six inches in diameter and the wheel turned at 40 rpm and the distance from the outside yard to roof, some fifty feet.  The circumference of the axle was close to 19 inches.  With the rope wrapped around the axle, one rotation lifted the rope just over a foot and a half, fifty foot would take just over 30 seconds. Using pulleys to reduce the load would extend the time to perhaps a couple of minutes, just about long enough for all the spectators, of which there were said to be many crowded into the room, to view the lifting process, through the two windows.

The Kassel wheel turned at 26 rpm but was able to lift the same weight as the Merseburg wheel.  It was, however six inches thicker than the Merseburg wheel and I suggest it was wider to accommodate additional weight to compensate for its slow rotation.  This supports Bessler's claim that he could manipulate the internal design to supply different speeds and load capabilities.

So the visitors and Bessler himself, saw the wheel as having the potential to be made more powerful either by increasing the number or size of the weights, or by reconfiguring the internal mechanisms.  

In Apologia Poetica Bessler answers the following question thus; "Could I undertake to construct even larger wheels - and to what size do I think they could be taken?”

Answer - with the help of good assistants I would have thought that something well over 20 ells in diameter would be possible, should anyone think such a thing desirable, and if the Lord should grant me the necessary strength and health." 

Twenty ells equals about 37 feet!  Imagine how much power you'd get from a wheel that big, and then multiply the number of them by, say ten on a single axle, and then tell me that Bessler's wheel will be useless because it is incapable of supplying enough power to be of any use.

It seems obvious to me that building a wheel capable or turning in either direction is clever but not practical.  The first two wheels which were one-way, began to spin spontaneously as soon as their brake was released and were capable of 50 rpm and I suspect would probably do more given the skills of modern engineering.  Add in the increase in size, weights and the improvements of configuration possible once the design is understood, and then add more wheels to each axle and you could potentially have a powerful electricity generator.

JC

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