Update - My Hypothesis is being Evaluated.

Owing to the imminent (I hope!) house move, my work on my wheel has been suspended for now.  Maybe I will return to it once we have moved. In the mean time, I have at last finished the document I was writing, in which I lay out in detail my hypothesis about how Bessler's wheel worked.

If I had anticipated what would it would take to describe what was in the wheel and how it worked and which bits related to Bessler's clues, and how many drawings I have to make, well,  I might have gone with the simpler idea of a video of a working wheel.  But that has not materialised to date, possibly because I am wrong but also due to my limited manufacturing skills and equipment.  Yes I know, plenty of excuses for not producing the required evidence!  So now I have put my money where my mouth is, or something to that effect.

I have sent copies of the document to two people for whom I have the utmost trust and respect, and they are attempting to find something positive in my ramblings.  Actually I have tried not to ramble too much about the hypothesis, cutting it down to a minimum and eliminating unecessary verbiage, and yet the result is a document barely contained in 35 pages with 21 illustrations.

This has given me pause for thought, it's amazing that Bessler managed to hide so much information inside two publications?  Of course I suppose you could more than halve my document because much of it has to relate to Bessler's clues and my interpretation of them.  I suspect that chapter 55 of Apologia Poetica contains the text which describes how his wheel worked and perhaps once his wheel has been proved by someone, work will begin in earnest to wrest the information from Bessler's coded version.  

So now I wait, and the longer it takes the better, in my opinion.  I don't want to hear that they have dismissed my hypothesis too easily, but I'm open minded about the result.  When you have obssessed about something for as long as I have, it's hard to get an objective view of the picture.  A fresh pair of eyes will doubtless see through the mass of speculation and find the truth - positive or negative, I don't worry any more.  It has actually been something of a relief to at last share what I know and ultimately get some feedback.

I'm 71 next Friday, a good day for good news!

JC

The Legend of Johann Bessler's Wheel.

I have replaced my usual blog with a brief account of the legend of Bessler's wheel.  I'm currently unable to maintain the frequency of my blog due to commitments which are keeping me exceedingly busy!  Once I have found and bought my house, I shall return to the blog plus I shall have published my interpretation of a large number of Bessler's clues, none of which relate to Bessler's portraits.

4th April 2016

JC

The legend of Bessler’s Wheel began on 6th June 1712, when Johann Bessler announced that he had invented a perpetual motion machine and he would be exhibiting it in the town square in Gera, Germany, on that day.  Everyone was free to come and see the machine running.  It took the form of a wheel mounted between two pillars and ran continuously until it was stopped or its parts wore out. The machine attracted huge crowds.  Although they were allowed to examine its external appearance thoroughly, they could not view the interior, because the inventor wished to sell the secret of its construction for the sum of 10,000 pounds – a sum equal to several millions today.

News of the invention reached the ears of high ranking men, scientists, politicians and members of the aristocracy.  They came and examined the machine, subjected it to numerous tests and concluded that it was genuine. Only one other man, Karl, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, was allowed to view the interior and he testified that the machine was genuine. He is a man well-known in history as someone of the greatest integrity, and  the negotiations between Bessler and Karl took place against a background in which Karl acted as honest broker between the warring nations of Europe; a situation which required his absolute rectitude both in appearance and in action.

There were several attempts to buy the wheel, but negotiations always failed when they reached an impasse – the buyer wished to examine the interior before parting with the money, and the inventor fearing that once the secret was known the buyer would simply leave without paying and make his own perpetual motion machine, would not permit it.  Sadly, after some thirty years or more, the machine was lost to us when the inventor fell to his death during construction of another of his inventions, a vertical axle windmill.

However, the discovery of a series of encoded clues has led many to the opinion that the inventor left instructions for reconstructing his wheel, long after his death.  The clues were discovered during the process of investigating the official reports of the time which seemed to rule out any chance of fraud, hence the  interest in discovering the truth about the legend of Bessler’s wheel.

My own curiosity was sparked by the realisation that an earlier highly critical account by Bessler's maid-servant, which explained how the wheel was fraudulently driven, was so obviously flawed and a lie, that I was immediately attracted to do further research. In time I learned that there was no fraud involved, so the wheel was genuine and the claims of the inventor had to be taken seriously.

The tests which the wheel was subjected to involved lifting heavy weights from the castle yard to the roof, driving an Archimedes water pump and an endurance test lasting 56 days under lock and key and armed guard.  Bessler also organised demonstrations involving running the wheel on one set of bearings opened for inspection – and then transferring the device to a second set of open bearings, both sets having been examined to everyone’s satisfaction, both before, after and during the examination.

So the only problem is that modern science denies that Bessler's wheel was possible, but my own research has shown that this conclusion is wrong.  There is no need for a change in the laws of physics, as some  have suggested, we simply haven't covered every possible scenario in the evaluating the number of possible configurations.

I have produced copies of all Bessler's publications, with English translations.  They can be obtained by clicking on the appropriate links on the right.

JC

2016 Update

Still working on my wheel in the garage, despite the imminent move from this house to another one.

Recent discussion on BW forum mentioned, once again, that  nothing on paper will convince anyone of any claims to have found the solution to Johann Bessler's wheel.  This has been my stance for many years and now I find myself having to (possibly) eat my words!  I have some how convinced myself that I know how the wheel worked blah blah blah!  

So making the wheel would obviously be the next step, but all sorts of excuses are available - the house-move is restricting my time and access to the wheel; my workshop tools are out-dated, suffering like me from old age; my drill has seized up and I should buy a new one but I borrowed my father-in-laws old one which has been lying in a pool of water for the last seven years and I am nervous about plugging it into the electricity, so it continues dry out on a radiator!  Its too cold to work out side at the moment . . . . .and so on and so on.  

All of these excuses are real (Really! Honestly!) so I am considering the other ways of getting my design verified.  I have an idea which way to go, so please don't feel the need to advise, I have plans but in the mean time I must try to continue the build and hope for warmer weather, and do not worry I shall not be testing the water-logged drill, I shall dump it at the earliest opportunity and buy myself a shiny new one.

**********************************************

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and since then I have made my decision about my next step.  I left the above as it is because I think we all go through these procrastinatory steps and I thought it worthwile to describe it for the benefit of those lucky people equipped with superb workshops and all the right equipment and no lazy habits which lead to dilatory outcomes.

In the end I have solemly promised that, come what may, my theory will be published this year, wheel or no wheel.  And because a paper hypothesis would be ignored I am taking steps to marshall some impressive supporting evidence for my hypothesis which hopefully will not be ignored.  But in the end a wheel must appear.. . this year.

JC

It's About Time for Bessler's Wheel to make an Appearance.

As I'm sure you all know, I'm Bessler's biggest fan, but I think that when he set out to market his wheel he must have found it difficult to list the many benefits he hoped it could offer.  He suggested raising heavy loads up the sides of high buildings; pumping water out of flooded mines; driving a carrilon; pumping air into a submarine; crushing rocks etc.  Not a real attention-grabbing list! The truth is the wheel represented little more than a novelty item, mostly attractive to rich princes and just the kind thing that Andreas Gärtner - his number one enemy - had made a career out of, making novelty toys for his ruler.

Bessler's wheel could never have pumped water out of the mines.  Thomas Newcomen's beam engine had it beaten before it started.  The Newcomen Beam Engine at Elsecar in Yorkshire, England, ran from 1795 until 1923 when is was replaced by Electric Pumps. It also ran briefly in 1928 when the electric pumps were overwhelmed by flooding. At its peak it could draw 600 gallons a minute from a depth of almost 200 feet.

Newcomen's engine were heavy users of coal at around 12 to 20 tons per day.  Cheap enough when it was used in a coal mine but expensive to run in Cornwall's copper and tin mines.  But although the running costs were prohibitive they were regarded as a worthwhile expense.

Besslers's wheel, on the other hand, equired an enormous initial cost and then no return to speak of, regardless of how large it was.  The implication was that a larger version of his wheel would do even more work than the Kassel wheel. In fact some people regard Bessler's suggestion that his wheel could easily be built to 20 feet and more in diameter and have several wheels in series on one axle, with considerable scepticism.  They think that that was too big and could not be built at the time, but consider John Rowley's tidal wheel for pumping water from the river Thames to Windsor Palace which measured "twenty-four foot diameter and twelve foot broad; for the new brass engine with brasses to the crank, forcing rods," etc, and of course the mighty Newcomen engine itself, whose balance beam measured, in some cases twenty feet or more in length and over a foot thick, with a weight of several tons.  The whole thing housed in a specially built and strengthened building.  That was large.

So Bessler was, as we have noted before, some 300 years ahead of his time.  There was no point in producing a machine for which there was little demand. Newcomen's machine were made in their hundreds all over Europe in the 18th century and despite their heavy consumption of coal regarded as  indispensable for removing flood water from mines.

The truth is there was no real interest in buying Bessler's wheel, disregarding the fact that it was suspected of being a scam, it is hard to think of any genuine use for it at that time - but things have changed  - turned full circle (apologies for an obvious pun!) - no longer is the potential for a gravity-enabled wheel zero. Bessler's time has come.

The obvious use is to generate electricity, maybe not on a large scale - who knows - but certainly by household or by street.  There is no need to enumerate the potential for alterntive uses.

The materials that Bessler could use were limited to wood, iron, brass and lead, but now the range is enormous and there may be some with properties that might work perfectly with an electric wheel. Changes in the design, taking into account the special configuration necessary to obtain continuous rotation, might result in huge improvements to output, just as the Boulton and Watt improvements to Newcomen's engines in Cornwall in 1778 resulted in an increase in depth to 300 feet in mining and 75% less fuel consumption.

There are two major advantages in developing Bessler's wheel; free energy anywhere on the planet - and no pollution.  Certainly worth striving for.

JC

HAPPY NEW YEAR

SUCCESS THROUGH INTUITION AND EXPERIMENTATION IN 2016

Mathematics in our world is a vital tool for invention but Michael Faraday had no use for it, in fact he believed that the subject could actually be a hindrance to successful experimentation. He worked intuitively and experimented with new ideas until he had exhausted all possibilities.

I have little use for maths in my search for a solution to Bessler's wheel.  I read with a glazed expression the discussions about varous forces and formulae and I continue with my experimentation.  I leave aside simulation and animation, possibly because I am not au fait with much of it, but also for me it would be too easy to overlook something that only becomes apparent when you have the parts in your hands. Handling parts, moving them manually, altering the range of movement, moving and adjusting the positions and sizes of the weights - all of these things help to visualise the potential new configurations that would not be visible in simulations if only because all of these things have to be fed into the computer to see what happens.

That is why I ignore statements which deride our efforts here.  It has always seemed to me that gravity holds the answer to Bessler's wheel, but I learned long ago that I was not supposed to regard gravity as an energy source and I always try to maintain that stance in public, but actually I still think of it as an energy source and that gives me an advantage over all those people who persist in looking for another energy source.

Bessler clearly (in my opinion) took the same view and that is why he succeeded where everyone else failed.  I know that in 2016 the solution to Bessler's wheel will be published.

And here's another thing - people have questioned whether planet earth completely covered in gravity-driven wheels would have some detrimental effect on us, the earth or some other facet of our lives.  To me the answer is simple; no it won't have any detectable effect.

Gravity is basically a non-contact force so any collisions resulting from its attraction are secondary, it has simply been the vehicle in which mass rides.  In a car crash we don't blame the car engine for driving us at speed into a wall and causing terrible damage.  The resultant damage is simply the effect of stopping suddenly.  If we hadn't hit a wall, the work being done by the speeding engine would have continued onwards as before.  So when a weight falls, regardless of whether we use the fall to raise another weight or rotate the wheel  a little, gravity does its thing in making the weight fall and then continues on its merry way looking for something else to make fall.

Bessler’s wheel was driven by the reaction of falling weights to the force of gravity. No-one can argue that the energy is not free to us even if at some nano level it is paid for throughout the universe. I'm satisfied that nothing we do on earth here using gravity as our energy source can effect anywhere in the universe by any detectable means over any period of time you care to consider.

So onwards with enthusiasm, optimism and hope!

JC

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all of you who kindly frequent this place. I'm grateful for your attention and comments.

I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and I hope that you all have a wonderful time.  

I shall be relaxing and drinking and eating with my wife, Sandra, my two daughters, two son-in-laws and three grandchildren and their two dogs!  One's a golden labrador with a permanent grin and the brightest brown eyes you ever saw, and the other is a hungarian vizsla with skin like velvet, also known as the 'velcro' dog because he sticks like velcro to his owner, who is my grandaughter, a newly minted school teacher.

My house is finally sold and not just to any old chap, only the CEO of one of the biggest car manufacturers in the UK, he bought it as an investment!  It's just pocket money to him but worth a lot more to me.  

Still looking for our next home so will be moving in with one daughter in January until we find it.

Bessler's wheel still in progress despite the trials and tribulations of an on-and-off house sale.  Still hoping to finish it before we vacate this house and there will be more time (I hope) after the New Year. 

 If you are a betting man put your money on me in 2016.

Kind regards and best wishes,

John.

Bessler's Wheel and Climate Change

A deal to attempt to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2C has been agreed at the climate change summit in Paris after two weeks of intense negotiations. The pact is the first to commit all countries to cut carbon emissions, and nearly 200 countries took part, and it would come into being in 2020.

On the face of it exciting and encouraging news, but of course it's full of holes and let outs.  I don't need to go into these nor list the major states which were, understandably, reluctant to sign up to a condition that they feel could hamper economic growth and development. 

Although I remain unconvinced that this is a man-made problem and not a natural turn of events, I accept that the pollution caused by the current fossil fuel consumption is undoubtedly a cause for concern.  So the search is intensified to find an alternative source of energy and one that could be applied anywhere on or in the planet earth.

Below, smog in Beijing caused by industrial pollution.

On my way to Rome a couple of years ago, I had to change planes at Amsterdam and a plane came in from Beijing.  The passengers queued to catch an onward flight and everyone of them wore the smog masks as you see above.  I asked one of them why and he simply said, "we must".  I told him he was OK here in Europe and didn't need to keep them on and he just smiled and shook his head.

I saw an interview with Anote Tong this week, who is the President of Kiribati, an island republic in the Central Pacific, comprising 33 coral atolls stretching along the equator. It is one of the first countries in danger of becoming uninhabitable owing to climate change.  Because atolls are naturally low-lying, and have a high ratio of coastline to land area, they are especially vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surges.

President Tong's message was that we should not be thinking of this is a problem for the future, his country is feeling the first effects of global warming now. With most of its land only a few feet above sea level, Kiribati has already seen growing damage from storms and flooding. Some of the nation's uninhabited islets have even vanished beneath the Pacific.  Global warming threatens to render Kiribati unliveable well before it is completely submerged. If global warming continues at today's rates, rising ocean waters may shrink Kiribati's land area, increase storm damage, and threaten its freshwater reserves.   He asks that everyone should be concerned and seek any kind of alternative energy source.  Solar panels and wind turbines are all very well but they cannot hope to replace fossil fuels as an energy source, we need something more basic, more universally usable and available in the very, very near future.

I know that we still have an enormous vertical cliff to climb to convince the world at large that Bessler's wheel did work and perhaps it might ultimately hold the key to reducing industrial pollution.... and maybe not, but surely it's worth trying. The wheel must be proven to work first, then it's up to the design-engineers to find ways of upscaling the basic model.  Bessler said bigger and more powerful wheels could be made and we have no evidence that he would have misled us about that, nor can I think of why he would have done that.  We must take him at his word.

How utterly amazing would it be to successfully reconstruct Bessler's wheel and then find that the entire world had taken the technology and developed it and found that this 300 year old machine had solved the problems of the 21st century!

JC

Gravity - Ultimate Source of Energy for a GravityWheel.

It's a curious thing, that energy cannot be drawn from gravity; it feels instinctively wrong.   Yes, I know, gravity is not an energy source but intuitively it seems plausible. Sir Isaac Newton's view of gravity provided the same basic model that we accept today; that gravity is a force which tries to pull two objects toward each other.  Anything which has mass also has a gravitational pull. The more massive an object is, the stronger its gravitational pull is. Earth's gravity is what keeps you on the ground and what causes objects to fall.

A force can push or a pull, and is capable of moving objects of mass,  but does that mean it's consuming energy?  Sometimes, provided there is potential energy to consume. For instance, holding a rope taut is using force. Pulling something towards you with a rope is using energy.  If you're standing on the surface of the Earth, energy is not being spent to keep you from falling to the ground, even though a force is pressing upon you.  It's only when the force moves an object of mass that energy is consumed.  So force is independent of work because it's possible to have forces that do no work.

Note - when I say that energy is consumed I do not, of course suggest that it has gone, but merely changed to another form of energy, as we all know, energy cannot be created nor destroyed.

So force does consume energy when it makes something move.  But that energy has to be there first before the force can use it.  There is a law of conservation of energy but there is no law of conservation of force.  The force is always with you - on earth anyway!  In gravity's case without any potential energy there can be no energy expenditure, so how do we get potential energy?  We do some work against gravity, and that energy is stored as potential energy.  Lift a weight and you have the potential energy to drop it.

But...in the case of Bessler's wheel, in order to continually rotate, it would require a continual supply of energy from falling weights.  Conventional thinking dictates that a gravity wheel will never have a continual supply of energy because any energy gained by the falling weight on the one side of the wheel is cancelled out by returning the weight to its original height on the other side of the wheel. 

That is more or less where we have been for the last three hundred years - how to get the weights back up again without extra energy being required?  Despite their assurances that we are all ignorant of the basic laws of physics or crazy lunatics - we continue to believe in Bessler.  For me, it's a gut feeling, an instinct coupled with strong circumstantial; I know Bessler's wheel is possible.  But 'knowing' is not enough, it must be proved and the only way is with a physical proof of principle wheel.

There is a source of continuous power -  and on earth that source is gravity.  Now I know it isn't the actual energy source but it is so close to being just that that I'm going to say it is.  And I'll tell you why?  It is really a matter of semantics. 

Semantics -  the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. It includes interpretation and common usage and accepted norms.  So... the application of gravity to the weights drives the rotation of the wheel.

To put it another way, without the force of gravity the weights would just float where ever you placed them. You need the driving force of gravity to move the weights, without which you've got nothing!  In my opinion therefore gravity ultimately provides the energy, even though there is no apparent depletion of energy levels.  I say 'apparent', because gravity obtains its force from the universe and all the objects of mass within it, interacting with each other.  We have no precise information about gravity so we must simply accept that for us it is a permanent feature of our world.

We know that gravity attracts mass. We also know that the mass has to be free to move in the direction of the force of gravity rather than against it and is not fixed in position.  In other words it can fall.  If it can fall it has potential energy which is changed into kinetic energy.

1) We know that Bessler's wheel used weights; 

2) We know that the wheel required the repeated 'loading' of potential energy by repeated lifting and returning of the weights to their pre-fall position;

3) We know that gravity used that potential energy to make the weights fall

4) We know that Bessler's wheel worked

5) Thus the wheel was driven by gravity.

Consider this.  Bessler's first two wheels began to turn spontaneously as soon as the brake was released.  This suggests that the weight which was about to fall, was ready to do so, or indeed had already fallen.  This would lead to the immediate commencement of rotation.   The next weight would then begin its own action, falling and continuing the motion of the turning wheel.  According to conventional thinking at this point or near it, any energy gained by the falling weight on the one side of the wheel is cancelled out by returning the weight to its original height on the other side of the wheel.  But this only applies if you cannot engineer a reduced effect on the ascending side - something everyone of us knows and believes Bessler achieved.

Since it is so obvious to all of us that reducing the effect of the weights on the ascending side of the wheel will lead to continuing rotation, why do the experts continue to deny its possibility?  We know Bessler did it, ergo it is possible, and all those teachers who believed what they were taught..... are wrong.

Now all we have to do is discover how Bessler was able to lift the weights back to their former position without requiring extra energy from outside the wheel.  Simple.

JC

Johann Bessler, the Freemasons and Religion.

Some people have suggested that Bessler was a member of the Freemasons, but I doubt it.

John Theophilus Desaguliers (12 March 1683 – 29 February 1744) was a French-born British natural philosopher, clergyman, engineer and freemason who was elected to the Royal Society in 1714 as experimental assistant to Isaac Newton.   He is familiar to us as the recipient of Fischer von Erlach's letter describing Bessler's wheel, and for his public lectures decrying the possibility of a perpetual motion machine as constructed by Johann Bessler.

As a Freemason, Desaguliers was responsible for the establishment of the first Grand Lodge formed in London in 1717 and served as their third Grand Master in 1719 and was later three times Deputy Grand Master. He helped James Anderson draw up the rules in the "Constitutions of the Freemasons", published in 1723, and he was active in the establishment of a Masonic charity. 

During a lecture trip to the Netherlands in 1731 Desaguliers initiated into Freemasonry Francis, Duke of Lorraine (1708 – 65) who later became Holy Roman Emperor. Desaguliers also presided when Frederick, Prince of Wales, became a Freemason in 1737, and he additionally became a chaplain to the Prince.  But there is no record of him approaching Karl the Landgrave, with the intention of initiating him into the brotherhood, and anyway the dates do not support such a conjecture.

Obviously Karl the Landgrave was not involved in Free-masonry, although his grandson  Prince Karl, the brother of Wilhelm I of Hessen-Kassel was a Grand Master. Both were the sons of Frederick II of Hessen-Kassel, from his wife, Mary of Hanover, Princess of Great Britain, daughter of George II King of England.  His grandson, also named Karl, was the Freemason, not Karl the Landgrave; this has led to the confusion over the Landgrave's alleged membership of this organisation.  This was in the 1780s, some forty years after Bessler's death.

The point is that neither Bessler nor his patron, Karl the Landgrave were concerned in any way with the Freemasons.

However Bessler did spend time with a Jesuit priest and a Jewish Rabbi in the ancient city of Prague. There he learned something about Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Book of Nature and the Language of Angels. These subjects have been difficult to identify, but John Dee and his sidekick, Edward Kelley wrote a book supposedly in the language of angels, Enochian, which appears to be a coded document, but it has proved impossible to decipher, that is if it was intended to be.  Kelley met an untimely end in Prague when his promise to turn straw into gold failed and he was imprisoned and died a prisoner in late 1597/early 1598 of injuries received while attempting to escape.

What might Bessler have learned in Prague?  My personal belief is that he learned something of the religious beliefs of both the Rabbi and the Jesuit priest.  He also learned about encoding messages which the Rabbi and the priest used in their communications with each other.  The chronogram was a common feature on building and epitaphs in Germany of that period and popular also among the Jews and Romans in both times past and during the early 18th century.  Clearly this subject must have been explored during his stay in Prague because it seems as though Bessler became obsessed with the chronogram.

Bessler visited Prague in about 1700, in 1696 Prague’s Jewish community was shaken by the show trial of the alleged murderers of 12-year-old Shim‘on Abeles, which marked the culmination of Jesuit efforts to Christianize Prague’s Jews.  Bessler, writing about the Rabbi, relates how "the Jew was a good Christian! He was a great exponent of the teachings of Nicodemus, and all in all I learned more with him in a short time than most people learn in many years."  This curious description of the Jew being a good Christian may relate to the comment above which describes the culmination of the Jesuit efforts to Christianize Prague's Jews at roughly the time Bessler was there.

Earlier Bessler describes how "a Jesuit came to see me - perhaps the most learned priest I'd ever met - and soon we were great friends".  It is possible that the Jesuit and the Rabbi had been discussing the Christianization of the Jews in Prague and from what Bessler said, perhaps the Rabbi was open-minded about the situation.  Their discussions may have influenced Bessler and later led to the publication of his ideas about uniting the Christian religions.

The above comments seem to indicate that Bessler was more than just an inventor hoping for get-rich-quick success.  He was a thinker, open-minded about religion, but still a committed Christian.  In his list of 141 Bible quotations in Apologia Poetica, many of the references do not come from the Protestant bible either of that time nor currently.  Othes refer to books only in the Roman Catholic version and some from the Hebrew bible, which seems to support the idea that he was an interdenominational Christian.

JC