Those mysterious so-called Xs, which aren’t 'X's!

This post is highly speculative but if it generates some ideas or thoughts, we might get closer to the truth -  if we haven't already got there!

One of the most overlooked peculiarities to be found in Johann Bessler’s Apologia Poetica, is the excessive use of the abbreviation for etc, which I and many others thought were ‘X’s.  Fortunately Stewart, a long time member of the Besslerwheel forum and a keen student of Bessler’s works correctly identified the true meaning of the character.

As he wrote on the Besslerwheel forum back in December 2005,

“The symbol that is found at the end of many of the lines of AP and what we have been referring to as 'X's are in fact two characters (or three if you count the .) and not 'X's at all. The first character is a round 'r' and the second is a. 'c'. Together they make 'rc', the German Fraktur abbreviation symbol for 'et cetera' which in Latin is '&c' and in English is 'etc' and means 'and the rest'. There is a totally different character for 'x' in the Fraktur typeface. This means we should refer to them as 'et cetera's and not 'X's, and anyone looking for an 'et cetera' code should also take into account all the '&c's that follow lines that end with Latin words in AP. “

The fraktur symbol for 'et cetera'.

The so-called 'r rotunda', is  a special character formed from the letter 'r’ and designed to follow rounded letters which allowed the printer or type setter to squeeze in the letter ‘r’ by closing the gap and leaving out the downward stroke of the R.  It does not represent the letter 'r' in this case, as it is simply a glyph derived from the 'r rotunda' and used in this fraktur abbreviation.

Nevertheless, knowing what the character means is only half the solution. Why would Johann place 184 ‘et ceteras’ at the end of so many lines?  He only used a few in Das Triumphirende, two single ones and four doubles  Given that the meaning of the abbreviation is ‘and the rest’ or ‘and so on’ and is usually used at the end of a list to indicate similar items are included and assuming that Bessler’s education included the correct use of the character, why would he even bother to place so many in completely inappropriate places?  He could read and write in Latin and clearly knew that the Latin version used the ampersand, one must conclude that his use of the abbreviation was incorrectly applied.

So why did he do it?  We do know Bessler compulsively used alphanumeric, alphabet substitutions, at-bash ciphers, chronograms, Rosicrucian and Masonic codes, drawings containing hidden information and some more codes of his own devising such as he used in chapter 55 of his Apologia Poetica - so why not offer an additional code which took the form of the et cetera character?  Such a device used as a part of a piece of coded information is typical of the man.  Did he think it looked like an x? Did he think we might be reminded of an x?

Below we can see an example of six lines each with an 'x' at its end, there are more of these but mostly they are limited to one per line and rarely more than one or two per page.  The one below is taken from the page adjacent to page 3.  One could argue that the use of the et cetera in this example is just about acceptable

I should point out that there are several occurrences where he uses two 'X's at the ends of a line, and of course he does so above the two wheel drawings in GB and DT.  See below for an example of double crosses, or 'etc's. (Page 74 second part of AP chapter 34)

Double crosses!

I recently posted some suggestions about his use of the word ‘cross’ as opposed to ‘crossbar’.  I didn’t point out that the word ‘cross’ might not be as suitable as ‘diamond’  to describe the shape, because ‘diamond’ while describing the shape reasonably well didn't do the job as accurately, because the diamond links two half xs whereas the cross is just one.

He tells us that one cross could hardly turn the wheel and more were needed.  He placed the etc symbol in inappropriate places and in large quantities to grab our attention, which it did.  There can only be one of two reasons, in my opinion; either the symbol related to the subject matter in the line, or the clue was in the form of the character it self.

The use of the double crosses in the above example might be for emphasis.  It reads "Here Wagner praises his turn-spit, of which a copper-engraving has appeared, claiming that it is actually a working Mobile".  But he also used numerous 'NB's to give emphasis, so one might conclude that one or the other character is superfluous.  While we are on the subject his overuse of 'NB's forms another clue which i will offer in the near future, again speculation, but interesting.

Despite the excessive use of the fraktur abbreviation for et cetera it is arguable that it is within the limits of acceptability, but if so, why is not present in his earlier non-Latin book, Grundlicher Bericht?

For reasons I will explain later, I believe that Bessler is hinting at the use of the scissors mechanism and suggesting a minimum of two.  Bessler's first two publications made no mention of scissor mechanisms so if he wished to provide a hint that they might be needed, the fraktur abbreviation might just be the clue he offered, however vague it might seem now.  I have no idea if this is a reasonable speculation because I have been unable to find anything which might connect the 'r rotunda' glyph with any kind of code, hidden writing or anything else of a concealed information nature.

BUT, if he did intend us to interpret the symbol as a cross he could not use the letter X as that would be too obvious, so the 'etc' might have seemed a safe substitute

If I'm wrong about the reason for the large number of fraktur 'etc's, then I must accept that they were simply there because Bessler used them incorrectly and was subsequently taught how to use them properly.  Or do they represent some so far identified method of information concealment?

JC

Was Johann Bessler an Undiscovered Genius?

A recent casual comment about Johann Bessler got me thinking; was Bessler a genius?  My first thought was to dismiss the idea because there was no proof that he actually built the perpetual motion machine despite all the evidence in favour.  Then I began to consider the facts and I came to the conclusion that if he wasn't a true genius he came very close and once his machine is verified I think the world will acknowledge that he was one.

Information coming from a variety of sources is suggesting that Johann Bessler was much cleverer than the fact that he was the son of a day-labourer might suggest. It was customary to label such people as peasants, but such inherently negative designations obscure the fact that many of them achieved successful careers in the service of their rulers and many of Bessler’s contemporaries in particular were employed by the State.


Much of the credit for their success in obtaining worthwhile employment must go to their school teacher Christian Weise who is well-known for his remarkable output of plays, novels, political debate, poetry and music as well as his successful career as headmaster of Bessler’s school.  If we are to believe Bessler, Weise regarded Bessler as his most gifted pupil and took a personal interest in his future. Weise’s plan for his charges, most of whom came from the poorer families in the surrounding area, was to equip them with necessary educational tools to obtain careers with the court.  Despite Weise’s high recommendation Bessler was sidetracked into the search for the solution to perpetual motion, and he followed a tortuous path to eventual success.


Øystein has made some remarkable discoveries which seem to indicate that Bessler had studied a number of ancient philosophies including Free Masonry, Euclid’s Elements, the Rosicrucians, plus he spent a considerable time in Prague, in the company of a Catholic priest and a Rabbi - a lethal combination at the time. Prague was a hotbed of esoteric thinking and the home Jewish Kabbalah, the centre of occultism, but also the seat of the Holy Roman Empire.  Johann Bessler absorbed information about these beliefs and adapted them to his own use and opinion.  We know this because evidence of their presence in his writings and the methods he used to hide information are only now surfacing.

When you add to this the various trades he accomplished expertise in, even before he studied the craft of organ building and musical notation, he was something of a polymath!

According to Wikipedia polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. That describes Bessler perfectly.  Gottfried Leibniz, a strong supporter of Bessler’s claims is widely regarded as a polymath, as is commander R.R. Gould, original biographer of Johann Bessler and the man who studied and repaired John Harrison’s extraordinary timepieces which won him the British Board of Longitude prize for dividing a means of establishing a ship’s longitudinal position at sea. 


These men were hailed as polymaths and lauded by all, why not Bessler?  Because his claims were and still are, believed to be impossible according to the laws of physics, despite the evidence that supported those claims.


Recent discoveries I have made reveal the extent of Bessler’s ingenuity and I will describe all of his extraordinary work and how the clues provide the information to build his wheel as soon as I have completed the document which will simply explain the design.  I cannot over emphasise the sheer ingenuity of his mind and the games he played with those who seek to decipher his clues.  In my opinion Johann Bessler was an undiscovered genius and I hope to prove it in the next few months.


JC

Future Plan update.

Following the demise of my plan to share all that I have found out about the design of Bessler’s wheel, I have decided a two pronged approach is the way to go.  I am proceeding with my original plan which has always been to build it and publish the results or, should it fail, publish the design anyway.  It might lead to success by someone else, because I know that I have discovered 90% of it, if not the whole thing.  At the same time I will draw up a detailed plan of how the wheel works according to me, and publish it when it's ready!

It might be thought that I could produce and publish such a drawing quite quickly, but I’m not the fastest nor the finest draughts-man on the planet, by any means, and I want it to be clear and understandable.  I may decide to save each part of the graphic build and then run it as a simulation of the build process.  I can’t do an actual simulation but I know there are many people out there who can.

I’m sorry that the sharing of the design and how I found each clue of Bessler’s which led me onward, has foundered on the rocks - but my plan involved some 50 posts and it wasn’t until I had posted about three times that the emails and PMs began to come in and I realised that I had set myself up for an impossible task of responding to each one, sometimes repeating myself several times, and with a growing number of them coming to me.  An excellent response and I’m not complaining, but it proved to be a cumbersome thing to deal with and in the end not necessary.

So once the design is out there, then I can write about the clues and hopefully show that Bessler did intend to leave that information to us for our benefit - and it would show that our design was exactly the same as his, which would answer those who say that we can never know whether our designs are the same as his.

JC

Johann Bessler’s Drawings Hold the Key

It has always seemed to me that the drawings in Das Triumphirende were really rather uninteresting and repetitive.  But I took note of his comments about studying Apologia Poetica, and also at the front of his Maschinen Tractate his suggestion that studying more than one drawing might lead someone to the correct design and thus the solution.  This appeared to refer to the drawings in MT, and perhaps they did, but I wondered if they might also hint at other drawings elsewhere.

If Bessler was serious about leaving the information on how to build his perpetual motion machine to posterity, I never believed mere words would suffice, there had to be that information in one or more drawings.  The hints Bessler left in AP were made many years before the MT had been started so the advice, although added later due to the arrest, is more likely to have referred to those earlier drawings.  I noted several apparent errors in the two drawings of the Merseberg wheel and subsequently found the pentagram which is unarguably present - and the clock which is also self-evidently a deliberate addition.

I explained the clock previously, how it points to the number 55 - 12 x 55 = 660, that being the total of all the numbers labelling the parts, (even after taking into consideration that the number 24 was changed to 42) in both Merseberg drawings. So to cut a long story short I discovered over a very long time what I believe to be Bessler’s  design.

I know that people are impatient to know what I think I’ve discovered or if it is worth anything and I understand that.  I will post everything, but if I just post the design I won’t have shown how and why I arrived at it, and it will look like mere speculation whereas if I can ‘prove’ that each point is derived from a clue within the drawing it might give people more confidence that I’m right.

So the four drawings in Das Triumphirende contain just about all the information you need to build Bessler’s wheel.  The Toys page helps to confirm some details and there are numerous clues all over the place pointing to - dare I say it?  - the numbers 5 and 55.  So today a brief suggestion about that number!

Below is a simple drawing illustrating why five mechanisms are needed.  That is all the room there is.  I’m not saying that it has to be five but I’m sure it is the minimum number.  Alternatives are 7 and 9.  The reason for using odd numbers will become clear in subsequent posts, it is simply a result of the design used and it might be possible using an alternative method to have even numbers of mechanisms.

There is much more to add to the above drawing (using up to about 50 posts!) and it is simply to show why there are five mechanisms in this particular version.

JC

The “great craftsman phrase” interpreted.

What follows is my interpretation of the “great craftsman phrase”.  In his Apologia Poetica, Bessler included many clues, some encoded and some merely ambiguously phrased so that getting the true meaning from each was a struggle.  The one I discuss here is one of the most puzzling, however in the following explanation I hope that the meaning becomes clear.

He wrote, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls a quarter, causes four pounds to shoot upwards four quarters.”  This curious phrase seems on the face of it to be nonsense and yet by picking it apart one can get at the meaning.   What Bessler sought to do was to tell us what to do but disguise it from the casual reader; however it has turned out more difficult than perhaps he anticipated.

Note that within the quote he mentions that there are five weights, one plus four, and each one is equal to one pound.  Secondly, one pound falls a quarter.  How do we define what he meant by a quarter? In this case he was referring to a clock - something he also included in the first drawings in both Grundlicher Bericht and Das Triumphirende - and a quarter of an hour or fifteen minutes covers 90 degrees.  But how could this single right angle fall cause “ four pounds to shoot upwards four quarters”? 

There has been so much discussion about what this brief phrase means, and much puzzlement – and yet once you know what it really means, it is very simple.  We saw in the first part that the word ‘quarter', referred to, not just 90 degrees but also to a clock.  In the second part the word ‘quarter' also refers to a clock but this time he has confused us by using the words ‘four quarters’. ‘Four quarter’s equals ‘one whole hour’.  Each hour on a clock is divided into 30 degrees, so the words ‘four quarters’ meaning ‘one hour’ as used here equals thirty degrees.  To paraphrase Bessler’s words, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls 90 degrees, causes each of the other four pounds to shoot upwards 30 degrees.”  

You might think that that is unremarkable and wouldn't achieve the result we seek, but as with all Bessler information you have to work at it and I have more information to share on this phrase, but at this point I will just say that it is not necessary for the weight being lifted to rise as far as it fell at this point in rotation.

You might also think it would have been better to have said that “one pound falls 90 degrees, causes one pound to shoot upwards 30 degrees”, but that would have removed the information that five weights, and therefore five mechanisms were involved, so it had to be four weights plus the one.  Also do not assume that I am saying that there were only five weights involved, there are more, another five for each of the scissor mechanisms.

This removes the problem of lifting four weights, or just one weight, higher than the same weight falls.

JC

Johann Bessler's so-called Cross-Bars

Each of these code-sharing posts will be simultaneously posted on the www.besslerwheel.com forum as well as here on my blog, so that I have my own record of the posts in this subject.

Each post will contain information I have found in Bessler's books which will hopefully help towards designing the actual mechanisms, and should convince those who believe that Bessler left no information about the actual mechanisms within his wheels, that in fact everything we need can be found if you know where and how to look.

Much has been written about Johann Bessler’s puzzling comment about his use of  cross-bars and I think it’s time I shared what I believe to be the truth about them.

In his Apologia Poetica, on page 71 of part two, he wrote, “If I arrange to have just one cross-bar in the machine, it revolves very slowly, just as if it can hardly turn itself, but on the contrary, when I arrange several cross-bars, pulleys and weights, the machine can revolve much faster, and throw Wagner’s calculations clean out of the window!”

That’s how it appeared in the English translation at the back of my publication of Bessler’s Apologia Poetica.  But a couple of years ago I decided to go back to basics and looked up the word creuze which appears twice in the above quote in the original German.  The word creuze was translated as cross-bar because it was one of dozens of alternative meanings in a huge German/English dictionary I owned, and seemed to be the best fit with Bessler’s description of his mechanism.

But I could not understand how it might be possible to design the wheel with just one cross-bar and it was then that I resolved to check out the whole translation myself.  The word creuze has one obvious equivalent in English and is the basic meaning in German, and it is cross.  There is one obvious place in Bessler’s entire output of mechanical drawings which can be described as a cross and it is in the scissor mechanisms.

The scissor mechanisms is an essential ingredient in the design of the wheel, according to Bessler.  It is obvious when you look at the picture below that the red parts are indeed crosses and in my opinion Bessler is suggesting that one linkage, or cross was scarcely sufficient to turn the wheel but more of them made the wheel turn faster.

The inclusion of the words weights and pulleys along with crosses, suggests that the three items are connected in some way, one of them being the scissor mechanisms.  This solves the puzzle of having “just one cross-bar”, because you could have several crosses on each mechanism.

In a subsequent post I'll show that there were only two X's required, although you can see 8 in the above picture which is from the Toys page in MT, if you include the two handles.  This suggests that more will be better?

You can see from the above single scissor mechanism that one X would provide the minimum  extension.  Two would give more extension.

JC

Where are Our Academic Peers?

Another brief beef about the system!

We often complain about the problem of trying to get people to at least consider Johann Bessler's claims in a more open minded way, but in an age of highly defined specialisation, there is a widespread intolerance for ideas that originate outside of ‘official’ university-based frameworks.

There is also a general assumption that if a new theory collides with a preferred paradigm it must be wrong. If you are not toeing the conventional line you are a pseudoscientist. This is academic mudslinging that rejects those who hold a reasoned counter-view.

The world of science is surely an amazing place and in my opinion, one of the most fascinating aspects of life both now and historically. It is a pity that so few people in academia actually use the real principles of open minded consideration of all evidential material, no matter how contradictory it may seem when compared to the current paradigm.

The definition of an academic is someone who has been trained in a given discipline and is subsequently employed by a university to teach and possibly conduct research in that subject. They are expected to work procedurally, to apply scientific testing to their logic and to comply with conventional protocol. This includes the process of peer review prior to the possible publication of new information in academic journals.

But we, who seek to prove that Bessler’s work was genuine, have no academic peers, so we cannot be reviewed and therefore our work cannot be directly published by any of the academic journals.

But.....even if we did somehow become part of an academic peer group, we would have to offer an explanation, if only in the most general terms, showing theoretically how and why Bessler's wheel did not conflict with the current laws of physics. Alternatively demonstrate a working model - have I said that before once or twice?!

JC

Johann Bessler's Logo

In his last and most professional-looking publication, ‘Das Triumphirende…’ (produced in 1719), on page 144, Johann Bessler included a logo-like doodle that at first sight seem attractive to the eye but meaningless.  But there is more to it than meets the eye. I have reproduced it enlarged so that it is easy to see the features incorporated with in it.  The logo is composed of a crown with some curious lettering beneath, some of which on closer inspection looks like the word Orffyre which was Bessler’s name according to the atbash cipher and before he latinised it.  There is some additional lettering reversed on the left side of the middle circle.

If I transcribe the letters into modern font it will be easier to read.  It says:-

HTARORFFYRE, which, when the left side is reversed, reads RATH ORFFYRE.  This means COUNCILLOR ORFFYRE.  

Below that there are 5 letters evenly spaced, which might stand for Doctor of Mathematics, Medicine and Perpetual Motion, attributes he claimed for himself, or possibly Music in place of Mathematics.

Knowing of Bessler’s propensity for using numbers and letters substitution in various ways, I was sure that the logo contained hidden information, and the key to solving this innocent looking code could be found. One of his favourite puzzles used alphanumerics and the above is easy to read.  If D is the fourth letter of the alphabet then applying the same principle to the other letters gives  4 + 12 + 12 + 15 + 12  = 55 (again!) But that cannot be all.

Here is one of those curious, easily dismissed anomalies I have spoken of previously.  Notice the ‘P’; it does not look quite right. Is it upper case or lower case?  If lower case then the upper curved portion is too big; if upper case then the downward portion should not extend below the line of text. Which ever is the intention it should be upper case because the other letters are.  But why are the letters YR above the letter 'P'  conjoined? Is there more to this than just producing five letters or at least five letters if you include the YR as one letter.

A possible clue might be seen in a handrawn version of the logo but with some variations as below

 
In this example the 'p' has a tail similar to the letter 'q' when hand written.  However it might also be also be a 'j' or some other letter, and these puzzles can be read to provide what ever answer you seek!  Notice that in the hand drawn picture Bessler has put the letter 'O' at each end instead of in the middle as in the first logo but this is not as good at providing the link to the two way wheel as the first logo does.  

As for the other features of the logo, the crown represents Karl, the ruler; Rath Orffyreus tells us that Bessler was a counsellor under Karl; the D.M.M.P.M. tells us, in my opinion, that he was a self-proclaimed, Doctor of Mathematics (or Music), Medicine and Perpetual Motion; the number 55 tells us that he was telling us of the importance of the number 55.  Finally, the leaf design is similar to the leaves of the Arondo Domax giant reed, which is commonly used in Organ Pipes of that period, and still is today for that matter.  This is a reference to Bessler’s skills in organ building.

I am leaning towards the letter 'M' standing for music since  Bessler's later connection with organs seems to be more suitable, and of course there are examples of his musical notation for the carillon he was hoping to build one day for another prince, Karl I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttelf.

One more item.  This a close up of the centre of the logo, and something that Bessler often used in placeof his signature.....

Very very interesting!

JC

Some more on Bessler's Codes

I've decided to share here, some more of the pieces of  Johann Bessler's coded information which I've discovered from time to time. For brevity I am reducing my explanations, just pointing out my findings and conclusions. The really detailed information is in my book which is steadily progressing and will be published in due course.

I put this clock up here last year but here's another chance to study it along with a little extra information.

Notice that the lines of perspective are as you would expect, all centred on the point of rotation.  I noted that there appeared to be a single gap in an otherwise fairly symetrical arrangment of lines.  I became curious when I noted that the two weights numbered 8 seemed to be on an alignment which passed through the centre of rotation but for which there was no perspective alignment available

The number eight figures seemed to me to be just on a line where you might expect an eight o'clock line to be.  Then I realised that when this line was added there were just twelve lines and made the logical conclusion that they must represent a clock.

Obviously I questioned the point of this inclusion and managed to relate it to another piece information. There appear to be a surplus of numbering in all of Bessler's drawings and this led me to the conclusion that the numbers might be designed to add up to a significant total.  This, as it turned out was correct.  I had already investigated the atbash route, converting numbers to letters, hoping to find a hidden text message but there was none. But the numbers in the above drawing total 660 and  660 divided by twelve (from the clock) comes to 55.   What is the relevance of the number 55?

Chapter 55 of his Apologia Poetica contains the mysterious Declaration of Faith, which also includes 141 Bible references which you can read more about in my web site http://www.orffyreus.net/

There I have shown the existence of a long and detailed code, but so far no one has to my knowledge deciphered it yet. I think that the number 55 had a dual purpose, firstly it related to his machine, and secondly it pointed to the largest piece encoded text.  The other hints at this number are numerous and I'll point out some of them in the next few weeks, but if you want to know Bessler's secret then you need to decipher the part of Chapter 55 I have described in the above web site.

PS As promised in comments, I include picture of the designs at the foot of page 128 on Apologia Poetica.  Do the represent Fibonacci spirals?

 And below is a rough copy of the preface to MT, I assume you meany this and not the actual preface?

JC