The Professor was nice to send me a detailed reply:
Robert,
Thank you for taking the time to provide such a comprehensive reply about Count Karl.
To your question: I am retired for 15 years now, and no longer have much interest in pseudoscience, except that I do keep up my "Museum of Unworkable Devices" which began as a source of physics puzzles for students. One can learn a lot of physics by seriously examining the physics of the classic perpetual motion devices. People send me designs to analyze. Most are reinventions of the square wheel, for their inventors are innocent of the long history of such inventions. A very few are interesting enough to make good puzzles. Some are so fiendishly complex that even the inventor doesn't claim to understand them, and useless as puzzles for students.
Most of my old notes were trashed when I retired. Much of my library has been donated to other libraries or to used-book sales.
As for perpetual motion, you will find most of my sources listed at the end of this page
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/people/people.htm .
One other source, not listed, was the book by John Collins, which it appears I gave away a few years back.
As I recall, most of the available sources in English are derivative of Dircks' books, which I still have. The book by Percy Verance is just an abridged rearrangement of material from Dircks. These are also available as free PDF books online. One frustrating thing about these secondary sources is that the seldom give complete bibliographies and specific references, nor any clue to who did the translations. I admit carelessness on this myself. On my page (link above) I have a quote from Jacob Leupold that probably does not appear anywhere else, since Hand-Peter Gramatke and I translated it from the original Old German one evening when we were discussing how often some of these folks are misrepresented in secondary sources.
You are eloquent in praise of Count Karl, and his integrity and honesty. I do not doubt this.
However, I am reminded of similar cases of intelligent, honorable and respected persons being victims of their own gullibility and will to believe. Years ago, in connection with my interest in magic (performance magic) I researched the history of spiritualism and its relation to certain scientists. A number of well known scientists were taken in by spiritualism and fraudulent spirit mediums. Naturalist Alfred Wallace, physicist William Crookes, astrophysicist Zollner, engineer Crawford, and a few others (I'm working from memory here). Zollner is an interesting case. He was a spectroscopist and invented an improved photometer for that work. He was fascinated by the new developments in mathematics of four and more dimensions, and thought that perhaps the spirit world was in a higher dimension. The spiritualist medium Henry Slade caught his attention, and Zollner persuaded Slade to spend some time on experiments done in Zollner's home. Zollner wrote a book "Transcendental Physics" about this, a classic of self-delusion and gullibility. Anyone only casually knowledgeable about spiritualist trickery can read this book and see how Zollner was being fooled. I still have a copy of this book, I think.
And then there's the sad case of Arthur Conan Doyle, a respected writer, who believed in the reality of fairies (little folk with wings) and was a believer in spiritualism. An honest, but gullible person.
So I cannot be impressed by the fact that Count Karl was an honest and intelligent man. My experience has been that even great minds often have a soft spot. Or as one wag has said, a "nest of wooly caterpillars".
Though much has been written about Bessler, I am frustrated at questions that are not anwered:
Why, during the demonstration of his wheel running in a sealed room for a long time do we not hear of anyone wondering whether there was audible noise of the running wheel the whole time? If not, why not? The room was sealed, but was it sealed so well that no sound could be heard. Accounts of earlier demonstrations describe the wheel as quite noisy. And why did Bessler not provide a small window so that anyone could observe the wheel rotating the entire time? That would have been strong evidence that no deception was involved. But by keeping out of sight we suspect deception.
Why didn't anyone weigh the wheel and report its weight? John Collins gave me his estimate, but apparently there's no contemporary supporting evidence.
Exactly how long did the wheel turn during demonstrations? The whole time? Or was it stopped and started again? Apparently so.
When the wheel was taken from its supports and put on a different set of supports, how many men were required to lift and carry it? Or was a mechanical winch used? If assistants were used to move the wheel, were they in Bessler's employ, or were they independent workers? My suspicion here should be obvious. In moving the wheel it could be rotated to "reset" its interior mechanism for another round of demonstrations. No one would notice. Of course we cannot know for sure, from the lack of detailed information about the procedure during the demos.
And I could make a complete list, but it would be tedious.
I doubt we will ever know the exact methods Bessler used to make the demonstrations seem miraculous. If any new information has turned up in the last 20 years, please point me to it. Otherwise I will consider this cold case to be laid to rest.
In the past, when I have investigated such things as this, I discover misinterpretations and misrepresentations in abundance. On my website I have documents about several. One is the Naples Geodetic Survey of Ulysses G. Morrow around the turn of the century which claimed to show that the earth was concave, a hollow shell with us and the entire universe on the inside. To the uninformed it seemed to have been a carefully conducted and reasonable experiment using mahogany and steel rectilineator sections to construct a nearly 4 mile land line to measure the concavity of water near Naples, Florida. But, having examined a surviving section of the rectilineator at the Koreshan Historic Site, I concluded that it was nowhere near rigid, and sagged under its own weight in the right sense to produce the erroneous results. No one else had previously bothered to question this. I have a web page on this.
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/morrow.htm .
Apparently no fraud or deception, just an honest blunder. But here, even though the original data notebook of Morrow seems to be lost, we do have an intact section of the rectilineator as evidence. In the Bessler case we have nothing of the sort.
And then there's the Tamarack Mines plumb line experiment which some claim also supports the idea of an inside-out hollow earth. This is much misrepresented in the secondary sources (probably deliberately, to deceive). I have a web page on that, too:
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/tamarack.htm .
-- Donald
