Breaking Through the Wall of Scepticism

On 9th February 2020, this blog will be eleven years old.   621 blogs and goodness knows how many comments have been posted, and there have been  nearly 1,500,000 visitors. My original intention was to try to draw more attention to Johann Bessler’s wheel; I’m not sure how successful that has been but I’ve enjoyed writing my blogs and reading the comments.

I was thinking about the difficulties we face in convincing people that Bessler was not a fake.  For much of my life I have researched Bessler and his wheel, and I have remained convinced that his claims to have built a genuine continuously moving wheel, enabled by gravity, cannot be refuted.  I didn’t need to think about it for long before I realised that the maidservant lied.  So it often surprises me that no one, out there in the ‘real’ world, would spare me one minute of their time to look at the evidence or consider my point of view.

Throughout the last eleven years I have avoided discussing politics and religion because each has its own adherents and devotees, who remain committed to their beliefs and I have no desire to tread on anyone’s toes.  But it has always seemed strange to me, as an atheist, that there are sensible, down-to-earth realists who dismiss any chance that Bessler’s wheel might have been possible, and yet believe that a man performed impossible miracles, was born of a virgin, came back to life from the dead etc etc.  I’m not belittling anyone’s beliefs and I respect their right to believe in a particular religion or branch of politics, but why is it so hard for those same people to at least consider that it is possible for a weight driven wheel to spin continuously as long as it is within the gravitational field?  There is more evidence for the latter than  there is for the former.

Of course I know the answer, and only today I heard a discussion in which a celebrity expert on astrophysics told how a famous American solar physicist, Eugene Parker, who in the mid 1950’s, developed his theory of super sonic solar wind and predicted the Parker spiral shape of the solar magnetic field in the outer solar system.  His theory was not accepted by the astronomical community and when he submitted the results to The Astrophysical Journal, the two reviewers rejected it.  The editor of the Journal overruled the reviewers and published the paper.  His work was resoundingly verified years later.

In 2017, NASA renamed its Solar Probe Plus to the Parker Solar Probe in his honor, marking the first time NASA had named a spacecraft after a living person.^[3] In 2018, the American Physical Society awarded him the Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research. It is not uncommon for scientists to present new ideas which are at first dismissed by their peers, as in Parker’s case and then subsequently accepted.  So many times the experts have later been proven wrong and their own ‘expertise’, dismissed, rubbished and scorned!

I put the words ‘belated recognition’ into google and it found that there were dozens and dozens of examples of belated recognition in a variety of fields and subjects.  There are too many to mention, but none as delayed as Bessler’s.  

One day someone will reconstruct Bessler’s wheel and, whoever it may be, and then their efforts will win belated acknowledgement for Bessler’s amazing discovery.

JC

Bessler’s Wheel and Obstacles Encountered During Build.

As you will know I have been striving to finish my Bessler’s wheel.  Given several requests to finish the wheel or shut up, I thought I’d try to give some idea of why it is taking so long and the difficulties to overcome.  If I give away some small clues along the way, I don’t have a problem with that.  You may well find that what follows is utterly confusing as I try to describe some problems I encountered, without illustrations, but perhaps you’ll get some idea of the difficulties I’m trying to resolve and recognise them from your own builds.  These same problems are typical in this kind of research if you actually do  hands-on builds.

The concept I’m working with is very simple and I can understand why Bessler feared that once people knew how it worked they might think the price he was asking was too high.  In addition there is Karl’s comment about it being so simple a carpenter’s boy could make one if he was allowed to study it first.  However I think his comment is misleading; even though it may be easy to understand, designing the mechanisms so that they operate correctly is another matter altogether.  You might look at the workings of a clock and understand how it works, but making a copy would be difficult and you might not understand how different parts interact and their purposes could easily be misunderstood. Imagine trying to do that without the device available to you, just some brief descriptions explaining how it worked. That is what we are trying to do.

A carpenter’s boy, meant apprentice, and in those days it was a way for young men to acquire skills in various trades.  Apprentices were formally bound to Master craftsmen for several years, without pay but provided with board and lodging. Upon release from his service to his  master, an apprentice would have become a highly skilled craftsman so we shouldn’t dismiss Karl’s comment as implying the wheel was easy to make, I think he was suggesting that the concept was easy to understand.

In my version there are five mechanisms, which I know goes against current opinion.  The mechanical action is quite complex, but nothing as complicated as a watch for instance, but seeing a working version where all the parts have been perfected to work together, would make it easy to copy, whereas only knowing the concept and designing it to work is not as easy.  I found that the mechanical arrangement leads to some parts interfering with the each other, so I needed to provide more room for each part to operate.  The extra room has to be found within the thickness of the wheel rather than its diameter.  This requires longer or taller pivot points than one might at first assume, because one part of the mechanism needs to be separated and held apart the other part of the mechanism.  If viewed upright on its axle, then there needs to be enough room within the thickness of the interior to allow all parts to operate without touching each other.  But to do this one has to get the moving parts in the right order through the thickness of the wheel so that each piece can operate smoothly without interfering with the other parts.  I know, this is hard to understand without seeing a drawing.

I believe I’m in between the point at which Bessler said he had found an action but it still took him time to design the whole working arrangement and the finished wheel He made a similar point in his message on the front of his Maschinen Tractate (MT)

There are a number of nuts and bolts, some of which have to hold two or three pieces together without allowing them to rotate against each other, whereas other nuts and bolts have to allow the pieces they are holding together to rotate against each other.  This is easy enough to arrange, but in some cases two of the pieces being allowed to rotate against each other cannot be allowed to rotate in such a way that the bottom of the nearest bolt is not clear of the moving part during the path of its rotation. So even these have to be separated a little.

His first wheel at Gera, was only four inches thick which leaves little room for the mechanisms to operate.  But although I did not concern myself with trying to fit everything within the limited space of four inches, in the process of avoiding mechanical interference I found a solution, which was to apply a slight double bend in the levers which altered their path at a particular point along their length thus avoiding the collision.

In addition to these factors some mechanical actions have to be designed to work in one direction only, so that they thrust in one direction but then return as a consequence of the wheel’s rotation.

Dealing with cords, ropes, string, cables, chains or belts - what ever you wish to call them - requires more ingenuity because there are points during rotation where the connecting material is taut and others where it is loose and in danger of fouling other mechanisms, or parts of them.  So keeping the cords out of the way means they need to always have a small amount of tension in order to keep them clear of all other pieces.

We know that Bessler was familiar with the workings of the church organ, so such concerns as outlined above, might well have been customarily encountered and for which there were remedies.  In my opinion, Bessler’s response to the question of springs indicated that springs were used to maintain tension in the cords, but had no part in helping the mechanisms.

Fitting the mechanisms on to the backplate or wood disc which I use, is simple but I found that the wood disc was never big enough.  The path of the mechanical actions can be estimated but for some reason although I always tried to place the mechanisms where I had worked out that they needed to go, I would then discover that the mechanisms were shooting over the edge of the disc and either catching onto the side edge of the disc or striking the floor when it was attached to the axle and it’s stand.

These are routine problems I have encountered from time to time over many years, but I am getting there.  Soon I hope to finish, but my fear is that my wheel won’t work properly without my having to unstick a mechanism or help a rope to move or some other snag which may cause problems because I lack the necessary skill and equipment.  If that happens I’ll just have to publish everything, but I was hoping to avoid the problem Ken had in publishing the design of an unproven device. But I will of course publish my design freely and without charge.

One more thing, as a consequence of comments in the preceding blog, I would just point out the difficulties described above would not show up in a sim, so although it might show a successful build, the detail for the build would still require considerable experimentation, trial and error.

JC

The Legend of Johann Bessler’s Perpetual Motion Machine.

 The Truth Behind the Legend of Bessler’s Wheel and the Orffyrean Code

On 6th June, 1712, in Germany, Johann Bessler (also known by his pseudonym, Orffyreus) announced that after many years of failure, he had succeeded in designing and building a perpetual motion machine.  For more than fourteen years he exhibited his machine and allowed people to thoroughly examine it.  Following advice from the famous scientist, Gottfried Leibniz, he devised a number of demonstrations and tests designed to prove the validity of his machine without giving away the secret of its design.

Karl the Landgrave of Hesse permitted Bessler to live, work and exhibit his machine at the prince's castle of Weissenstein.  Karl was a man of unimpeachable reputation and he insisted on being allowed to verify the inventor's claims before he allowed Bessler to take up residence  This the inventor reluctantly agreed to and once he had examined the machine to his own satisfaction Karl authorised the  publication of his approval of the machine.  For several years Bessler was visited by numerous people of varying status, scientists, ministers and royalty as well as hundreds of  local inhabitants.  Several official examinations were carried out and each time the examiners concluded that the inventor's claims were genuine.

Over the years Karl’s health began to deteriorate and his sons decided that it was time for the inventor to leave the castle and he was given five years salary and accommodation in the nearby town of Karlshaven. Despite the strong circumstantial evidence that his machine was genuine, Bessler failed to secure a sale and after more than thirty years he died in poverty.  His death came after he fell from a windmill he had been commissioned to build.  The windmill was an interesting design using a vertical axle which allowed it to benefit from winds from any directions.  

He had asked for a huge sum of money for the secret of his perpetual motion machine, £20,000 which was an amount only affordable by kings and princes, and it’s no coincidence that this sum matched that being offered by the British Government as a reward for the invention of a way to establish a ships longitudinal position  at sea.  Bessler clearly believed his invention was equal in value.  Many people were interested in Bessler’s wheel, but none were prepared to agree to the terms of the deal. Bessler required that he be given the money and the buyer take the machine without viewing the internal workings.  Those who sought to purchase the wheel, for that was the form the machine took, insisted that they see the secret mechanism before they parted with the money. Bessler feared that once the design was known the buyers could simply walk away knowing how to build his machine and he would get nothing for his trouble.  He said that a bag of money should be put on the table and the buyer could take the wheel there and then.  He swore that if he was found cheating he should be beheaded, a not unlikely result if he was found to be a fraud and deceiving his ruler.

I became curious about the legend of Bessler’s Wheel, while still in my teens, and have spent most of my life researching the life of Johann Bessler (I’m now 74).  I obtained copies of all his books and had them translated into English and self-published them, in the hope that either myself or someone else might solve the secret and present it to the world in this time of pollution, global warming and increasingly limited energy resources.




This problem of acceptance by his potential buyers was anticipated by Bessler and he took extraordinary measures to ensure that his secret was safe, but he encoded all the information needed to reconstruct the machine in a small number of books that he published. He implied that he was prepared to die without selling the secret and that he believed that post humus acknowledgement was preferable to being robbed of his secret while he yet lived.


It has recently become clear that Bessler had a huge knowledge of the history of codes and adopted several completely different ones to disguise information within his publications.  I have made considerable advances in deciphering his codes and I am cautiously optimistic that I have the complete design.


Johann Bessler published three books, and digital copies of these with English translations may be obtained from the links to the right of this blog.  In addition there is a copy of his unpublished document containing some 141 drawings, his account of the search for perpetual motion - and my own account of Bessler’s life is also available from the links.  It is called "Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?"  

Bessler's three published books are entitled "Grundlicher Bericht", "Apologia Poetica" and "Das Triumphirende...". I have called Bessler's collection of 141 drawings his Maschinen Tractate, but it was originally found in the form of a number of loosely collected drawings of perpetual motion designs. Many of these have handwritten notes attached and I have published the best English translation of them that I was able to get. Bessler never published these drawings but clearly intended to do so at some 


I and thousands of others around the world believe that Johann Bessler’s claim to have designed and built a perpetual motion machine, or a continuously rotating device enabled purely by gravity, was genuine.  The circumstantial evidence is compelling.  This device if reconstructed now, could potentially provide cheap clean electricity, and by reducing the need for fossil fuels, provide a huge step forward in reducing carbon emissions in a very short time.

For some ideas about Bessler’s code why not visit my web sites at

www.theorffyreuscode.com  and

www.besslerswheel.com      and

www.orffyreus.net.                and

www.orffyreus.org

For more information go to www.free-energy.co.uk

JC 

Global Warming or Overawing.

Cambridge Dictionary,  Overawing - to cause someone to feel a mixture of respect and fear. to feel threatened, intimidated, alarmed and frightened.

I’ve just been looking at the subject of global warming and it’s alleged causes.  I don’t think anyone is arguing that the earth is not warming, it’s the cause that is in dispute. I know that it is said to be due to an accumulation of greenhouse gases caused by the activities of humans in the last 100 years or so.  This allegation is by no means proven, it's a theory supported by an assortment of assumptions.

The major greenhouse gases are water vapour, which causes about 36–70% of the greenhouse effect; carbon dioxide (CO2), which causes 9–26%; methane (CH4), which causes 4–9%; and ozone (O3), which causes  3–7%.

To me at least and according to the above figures, 36-70%......the biggest culprit is water vapour, which is surely caused by global warming, but not necessarily the cause of it.  You must have more warming to increase the level of water vapour. Next we are told carbon dioxide is to blame for 9-26%.  Compared to water vapour it doesn’t seem amount to much.  Methane 4-9%, ok it has a more powerful, warming effect than CO2, but 9% maximum is not a lot.

The energy output from the Sun has increased significantly during the 20th century, according to a new study. Many studies have attempted to determine whether there is an upward trend in the average magnitude of sunspots and solar flares over time, but few firm conclusions have been reached.

Now, an international team of researchers led by Ilya Usoskin of the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory at the University of Oulu, Finland, suggest the answer. They examined meteorites that had fallen to Earth over the past 240 years. By analysing the amount of titanium 44, a radioactive isotope, the team found a significant increase in the Sun's radioactive output during the 20th century. Over the past few decades, however, they found the solar activity has stabilised at this higher-than-historic level.

Prior research relied on measurements of certain radioactive elements within tree rings and in the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, but these can be altered by terrestrial processes, not just by solar activity. The isotope measured in the new study is not affected by conditions on Earth. 

The results, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Astronomy etc; Astrophysics Letters, "confirm that there was indeed an increase in solar activity over the last 100 years or so," Usoskin told SPACE.com

So if global warming is the result of natural cyclical increases in the sun’s output, obviously the earth will warm up; the ice caps begin to melt, water vapour increase, green house gases build up.

I note several favourite phrases littering the public announcements from IPCC, such as, “ long-term warming can be explained by ...” - “ extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature” from 1951 to 2010 was caused by human activity”,  what, only half by human activity, who caused the other half?  “Natural variability in the Earth’s climate is unlikely to play a major role in long-term warming”.  You can read these documents and be persuaded, but once you take a note of the vagueness of the language, you should be suspicious of their conclusions.

None of these theories, suspicions, opinions are as firmly stated as the opinions, theories and suspicions that Johann Bessler was a fraud!

This begs the question, if they (the powers that be) are wrong or lying about the cause of global warming, why? 

Further research indicates a number of discrepancies in the claimed 97% of scientists in agreement with the IPCC.  For instance only those who publish their science are in agreement, but we know all about publishing science and how it has to pass the peer review test.  This automatically rules out every scientist who hasn’t published or failed to get published because his work did not pass the peer review.....or in other words, went against the current climate of opinion.  Excuse the pun, but I liked it!

BUT....if the truth be known, it doesn’t really matter what reason is offered for the climate change, the arguments demanding  the reduction in the use of fossil fuels, the target of carbon zero, the discovery of finding new forms of energy and its generation is a good thing, in my opinion.  I just don’t like the feeling that we are being led by the nose by the so-called experts.  We know them well and we don’t trust them.

JC

A Happy and Successful 2020 to All.

Good luck to all of you in 2020! 

I say this every year but this year is special, I don’t know why, but something tells me that the solution to Bessler’s wheel will be found and demonstrated this year. There’s a feeling in the air that hints at impending success; whether it’s the global warming warnings and the need to find a quick way to resolve the excessive production of  carbon dioxide gas; or the lack of any cheap, clean alternative to way of generating electricity, or the problems involved in storing it, I don’t know - but something tells me that this coming year, 2020, success will arrive and it will truly blow the minds of the opinion-makers, also known as “experts”.

The knowledge that they got it wrong for hundreds of years is going make thousands of opinion-makers try and correct enough printed text to make a pile of books that would stretch to the sun and back, not to mention rectifying the digital directives from those same people.

Keep at it guys, it’s going to happen this year, I feel it in my bones, and it could be you.

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

And on another matter, my granddaughter Amy, who has her own crowdfunding site, aiming to raise enough money to fund her rehabilitation at the amazing STEPS centre, has announced that she can move her left thumb.  Now that may not sound much, but considering that she has been unable move any part of her left arm and hand for more than a year, suffered excruciating pain in the whole arm, lost the use of her legs, been unable to sit up or support her head, been fed through the nose, suffered the indignity of a urinary catheter - she is beginning to make  a number of improvements!

Here’s her mother’s post on the crowdfunding site today! (my daughter Jo.)

“ Well, thought I would share the news with you all - Amy can now move her left thumb. The signal from her brain to her left thumb is now being sent and received......after more than a year of trying to get control of her left hand, she has now re-established that ‘broken’ link. Here we are, staying in Sheffield for a few days, giving Amy a ‘Christmas Day’ away from home....If she can’t come home for Christmas, ‘home’ will come to her! 

Thank you so much to everybody who has helped our daughter this year. I really do think that things will start to come together soon and that 2020 will be a major year in Amy’s journey towards recovery.

Please continue to support Amy and share this page far and wide to help raise awareness of CRPS, FND and PTSD.

Hope that you have all had a good Christmas and we wish you a Happy New Year too.

Love Jo (a very proud mum) xxxx

 See the very emotional video below, taken today!

For YouTube link to same video see https://youtu.be/NmNORQal1sw

https://www.helpamy.co.uk/           https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-our-amy-to-walk-again

JC

A Guiding Hand - or Predictable Evolution of Humankind.

Admitted ages of some visitors to this blog;

71,  47,  49, 52, 65, 67,  79, 49, 23, 69, 60, 64, 36, 74 1/2 and I’m 74 5/6ths!

I noted in my last blog, that most of us who continue to seek the solution to Bessler’s wheel seem to be in our 50s, 60s and 70s. I know there are some who are younger but this subject does seem to be occupied mainly by this age range.  But I don’t think it’s specifically our age that accounts for it, because most have been on this quest for many years, so it isn’t necessarily something we have turned to later in life.

Maybe it is the effect of the internet that younger people don’t feel the pull of curiosity to try to find out how Bessler did it 300 plus years ago. I’m not aware of any kind of publication that actually presented Bessler in a positive light before I published my own book.  Yes there is a huge history about all those poor misguided inventors who believed it possible to make a perpetual motion machine, but in every case the author either dismissed their work as impossible, sad, ridiculous or as the much respected Rupert Gould, suggested, “we must assume an imposition”.  It may be my imagination, but I detected some regret in Gould’s words, as if he wanted to believe it but could not say so for the risk of ridicule.  He went on to restore John Harrison’s incredible marine chronometers and he continued to investigate unsolved mysteries of all kinds.

Perhaps the internet with its complex coverage of all things weird and wonderful, mysterious and amazing provides such a plethora of subjects both real and imagined, that the legend of Bessler’s wheel gets lost in the avalanche of information.  This tremendous treasury didn’t exist in such a convenient form when many of us first became curious about perpetual motion and Johann Bessler.  It was there in libraries around Europe, but largely inaccessible. So in 1996 when I completed my research prior to self-publishing my biography on Bessler those who might have been curious would need to have been adults I guess, so later in the age of the established internet my work probably got subsumed among all the other wealth of information. 

I noted some pleasing connections between Gould who repaired Harrison’s clocks, and Gould’s accurate  account of Johann Bessler; Harrisons description of John Rowley as the finest craftsman in England; Rowley’s absolute conviction that Bessler was genuine; Bessler’s price for his secret exactly the same as the British government’s reward for the inventor of a method of establishing a ship’s longitudinal al position  at sea - £20,000; the prize won by Harrison.

It was 1712 when Bessler first exhibited his wheel, and in that exact same year, in Dudley, England, Thomas Newcomen set up the worlds first successful steam engine used for pumping water out of mines.  Talk about bad timing!  But actually it was just that Bessler’s wheel arrived about 300 years too early.   The steam age had to run its course first, and then the internal combustion engine, each consuming vast quantities fossil fuels, readily available without concerns or realisation of the damaging output of these various forms of power generation.

But now Bessler’s time has come.  It’s almost as if there was some guiding hand prompting the advances in industrial technology, only Bessler arrived too soon, out of his correct place in the timeline. Electricity arrived in time to take advantage of the steam engine, the petrol engine, the windmill, solar energy, hydroelectric power - it’s a long list and electricity has been there for most the time, just waiting for the right moment for Bessler’s wheel to arrive.

Although it had a long lead-in time, about 2500 years, knowledge of electricity eventually resulted in electric motors towards the end of the 19th century, but the steam age lingered on along side the petrol engine, which is still with us along side the electric motor.  But events are conspiring to make us find new ways to generate electricity, due to an excess of carbon dioxide, according to “experts”, caused by all the fossil fuel being burned. Electricity seems to be the ultimate power source for all things, but finding a method of generating enough in a clean, inexpensive way without affecting the world we live in, be it cities or the rainforest and everything in between, is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The effects of global warming, only now being taken more seriously, have applied pressure to the world of science and technology.  But the old pressures of peer review, job security, research funding and potential social embarrassment guide the researchers and technology experts into the straitjacket of toeing  the line, and avoiding at all costs any idea of challenging the established opinions of past “experts”. Anyone who proposes the possibility of a gravity-enabled device which is in continuous motion is assigned to the lunatic fringe.

I mentioned a “guiding hand” suggesting that now was the perfect time for Bessler’s wheel to make it’s triumphal entry on the world’s stage, and even though I’m an atheist, sometimes one can almost sense the actions of some guiding principle in humanity’s progress towards some future state invisible to us now.  Perhaps if Thomas Newcomen had had an accident in his workshop, say a boiler blew up killing him and all of his research, Bessler would have been available to take over the reins of progress in his own field of expertise. Or perhaps if Peter the Czar of Russia hadn’t died on his way to visit Bessler to buy his machine, would the steam age have taken off the way it did?  Actually I don’t think much would have changed, only the detail and emphasis on certain types of power generation.  So perhaps Bessler’s machine was a fall back position in case Newcomen failed to deliver? Maybe, but now is the time, it’s perfect!

JC

Wisdom of the Aged

I was going to call this post Wisdom of the Ages, but then found that it had too many connections with what I regard as aberrant philosophies, so I thought Wisdom of the Aged might sum up my tentative conclusions better.

Are there any young people searching for the solution to Bessler’s wheel? I ask this because I note that on the few occasions that a comment reveals the author’s age, some are even older than I!

I’m 74, nearing 75.  I wonder if this subject has been so thoroughly denounced by experts that it doesn’t even raise a question in the minds of the young.  I say ‘young’  to include anyone who is, perhaps only half way to retirement age.

I think it would interesting if commenters would like to state their age when they comment, just the once, so that I could establish some idea of the age range of those who are still curious about Bessler’s wheel.  You could do it anonymously.

On the subject of age, I’m amazed at how fast the time has flown by; my web site at http://www.besslerswheel.com/ was published in 2010;

My orffyreuscode web site http://www.theorffyreuscode.com/ was published in 2009;

And my work on deciphering Bessler’s bible references code at http://www.orffyreus.net/ was also published in 2010; and I published details the same year, about Bessler’s windmill, at http://www.orffyreus.org/ which he was building when he died.

But my first web site http://www.free-energy.co.uk/ went on line in 1997! I was only 51!

I decided to set up those later web sites when I realised that I had done all this work, I but didn’t want to share all of it before I had something that actually worked.  I had spent about ten years working on these subjects before I decided to share some of  my ideas, yet here we are, another ten years later and still nothing to show for it. There is stuff I won’t share because I still believe I have the solution, (and it won’t be lost if something should prevent me from finishing or publishing the rest). So ten years have passed and more since I did most of the work and yet here we are approaching 2020 and no sign of success yet

I found a copy of my first web site on the way back machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20000303142553/http://www.free-energy.co.uk/

First published in 1997! I can’t believe I’ve been on the internet for all these years, and I’m still chasing this phantom, mirage or ghost....... call it what you will.  Twenty-three years on and I’m still confident of success!  Forgive the naivety of the website, (and perhaps myself), I struggled through a steep learning curve at that time, learning how to self-publish, write web sites etc. Not that I’m much better now!  Still struggling with computers.

JC

Interpreting Bessler’s Information.

Interpretation is an extremely subjective activity.  The act of explaining the meaning of Bessler’s words and drawings results in an opinion which is bound to reflect the author’s personal convictions. I have published many interpretations which most people regard as speculation, but I stand by them, because I’m convinced of their authenticity.

The problem is exacerbated by other researchers also publishing their own opinions/speculations which may be correct but often leads to confusion among their readers.  This looks like criticism but it isn’t, it’s just the way it is and in my opinion it’s better to have as many interpretations available as as possible, in the hope that one will lead to a reconstruction of Bessler’s wheel.  I think that people will go with their favourite interpretation, one which accords with their own thoughts.

It is over three hundred years since Bessler published his work, and that was in German, which immediately creates the potential for confusion.  It’s hard enough to get the precise meaning of every word written in English three hundred years ago, but trying to do the same translating into English from the original German, plus the idioms of Bessler’s  time, and then add in some of his favourite obfuscation - ambiguity - and valid interpretation becomes fraught with perplexity!

But the drawings are another matter, there are no language barriers to hinder our understanding.  But something which may appear to be an obvious mechanical design is not always the case, particularly where Bessler is concerned. His 141 illustrations known as Maschinen Tractate (MT) is full of designs which all appear to be failures, however his unfinished notes which accompany some of them, hint at subtle variations which could be helpful.  But for me his most useful illustrations are the ‘Toys’ page and the one preceding it. What follows is my interpretation, but you may call it speculation!

MT 137, includes hints at 5 and 7 mechanisms.  MT138,139,140 and 141 (Toys page)  has almost everything you need to build his wheel, but there a few details without which it won’t work, but they are detailed elsewhere. I believe that the key to understanding the Toys page lies in looking at each figure without any preconceptions.  In other words, trying not to see them as pieces of mechanisms designed to work as you would think they would, but as shapes, possibly designed to act differently to how you imagine..

So seeing item A as a Jacobs ladder is wrong.  It is simply showing the five mechanisms linked together.  Item B shows a twisted version of A.  Items C and D show the same individual parts of A.    The parts of the mechanism include one C and one D, but D is twisted so that one end points the opposite way.  Item E looks like scissor jack but Bessler suggests that some items should be applied differently, and that, I believe is a crucial clue.

Bessler thinks highly of the scissor mechanism but his suggestion to apply it differently opens up a number of potential variants.  I at least, believe I’ve interpreted the Toys page, but of course without a working model it’s just speculation!

Link to my granddaughter’s gofundme site https://www.helpamy.co.uk/

JC

Bessler’s Wheel, odd numbers and the Pyramids.

You might think there cannot be any connection of interest to us, between Bessler’s wheel and the pyramids, but I will explained.

As many know I have remained stubbornly convinced that Bessler’s wheel had five mechanisms - I’m talking about his first wheels, both one-way wheels. I have also suggested that in other versions there may have been seven, nine and even eleven mechanisms.  In support of this conclusion I must point to the Maschinen Tractate (MT) drawings which include some anomalies in the numbering. See my article in www.theorffyreuscode.com, published 2009.

Bessler included the number of each illustration in his woodcuts. These are present up to and including number 104 They are of a similar style except for the numbers 52, 72, 92 and 102. In each of these cases the number two is drawn to look like a Z. All other examples of the letter two are shown in the usual curved style.  The angular number two may be intended to reflect the letter V twice, or in Roman numerals 55.

The ‘zed-like twos’ help to point to their accompanying partners, namely 50,70,90 and 100. The first and most obvious fact is that the number 5 is the first number to include the angular two. The only other numbers are the following odd numbers, 7 and 9. Why would this be done, I wondered. It seems to me that ever since I discovered the pentagon and the ubiquity of the number 5, that Bessler seemed to be suggesting that his wheel would not work with an even number of weights and that 5 was the ideal number. So 7 and 9 and even 11 mechanisms would also work but might be difficult to fit in to a wheel.

I also pointed out on the same website that MT137, the dodecagram or twelve pointed circle, also known as the circle of fifths because of its musical connotations, also contained a heptagram, or seventh circle.

So there are circles of fifths, sevenths and twelfths.  Is there any more? Many years ago I was watching a TV documentary on the pyramids of Egypt.  The presenter described the so-called ‘bent’ pyramid of Dahshure, which was started at a too steep an angle and had to be modified to a shallower slope when it was about half built.  It is thought that it became unstable at the initial angle, which interestingly  was set at 54 degrees, and then modified to 43 degrees.

54 degrees was immediately recognisable; it forms the two base angles of one segment of a pentagram.  It means that the apex of the pyramid was intended to form an angle of 72 degrees.  So each of the four faces of the pyramid was intended to reflect one segment of a pentagram.  Seeing as this idea did not pan out well because of the problems in building a pyramid with a geometrical figure inherent in its design, I wondered how they got on with the great pyramid at Giza.

It has been established that this pyramid (Khufu’s) was built with sloping sides of  about 51.5 degrees. If the bottom two angles of a triangle are both 51.5 degrees, that give an apex of 77 degrees, which doesn’t make sense at first sight.  360 divided by 77 gives us 4.67 - nothing relevant springs to mind.  I wondered if they wanted to build a pyramid reflecting a heptagram, but that would necessitate a slope angle of about 64 degrees, which we know was too steep.

The slope is 51.5 giving the apex an angle of 77 degrees.  It stresses the importance of the number 7 by producing it twice, and a circle divided by 7 gives.....51.5 degrees at the top angle of the pentagram segment. Although the builders could not build a pyramid reflecting a heptagram, they cleverly pointed to the geometric figure even though it wasn’t actually there.  It demonstrated what they wished to convey - their skill in constructing buildings which either demonstrated geometric figures, or implied their presence figuratively, rather than failing and building a pyramid without this key ingredient.

The reason I introduced the pyramid theme, is because Bessler used a similar technique to hide information.  Without actually drawing it he pointed to its existence with subtle clues and we could then infer its presence, just as we can the pentagram at the bent pyramid and the heptagram in the great pyramid at Giza.

One more fascinating fact; the Great Giza pyramid at 481 feet, was the tallest building on the planet until 1360, when Lincoln cathedral in England was built. It’s spire originally reached 525 feet before it collapsed in a storm, many years later.

Link to my granddaughter’s gofundme site https://www.helpamy.co.uk/

JC