Why I think Bessler was or was not a fraud.

[Marctwo]

1. The tests were too conclusive

Funny, I haven't heard of any conclusive tests. Of course, people still go back to "it ran for a couple of months in a locked room". Yes...? And...?

At best, this only shows that it ran for a couple of months in a locked room. This could easily have been achieved via clockwork. But what was the security like anyway? How can we be sure that no-one had access to this room? And why was it stopped?

When I've perfected my first unit, it'll run and run and run... In 300 years it will be still running in a museum somewhere with a sign saying "Running since 2008".

2. He was too committed, and wrote way way too much lit to not have succeeded.

It seems to me that he may have written way too much about stuff that didn't work to have succeeded.

3. His drawings were way past his time in science. Newton was his closest match/rival and even he couldn't or didn't respond.

His designs were incredibly over complicated to the point of being both naive and desperate. I think MT1 was one of his best wheel designs... Well it's elegant and it fails just as well as his others.

4. No one proved him wrong upon his death unlike others through history that have claimed the same.

The point is, no-one proved him right. It would have been very easy for bessler to arrange for his working designs to be made public after his death. Or even at a predefined date... like 2009 for example.

If his wheels were genuine, it may be more likely for him to have been proven right rather than left as an open case.

5. The codes.

Any codes or clues I've seen have been extremely ambiguous. But they'd have been very convenient to refer to when viewing any later successful third party machines... "Oh yes, that's exactly what I meant by this..." vague rambling...

6. His family/Karl didn't even discredit him or make a confession on their death-bed

Why do people assume that Karl would understand exactly what he saw? Was Karl some kind of engineering genius that couldn't have been mislead by Bessler?

More likely that Bessler showed him what he chose to show him and gave an apparantly convincing explanation of how this powered the wheel. This is just how magic/deception/con's work.

7. Bessler kept making more wheels. Each one bigger and more powerful than its predecessor. A scammer wouldn't have done that. Other claimaints either talked a good story or built one that didn't work, and their efforts burned out like a birthday candle.

If Bessler was a just a scammer and kept getting away with it, why wouldn't he keep building them? The notoriety alone would be sufficient motivation for some.

The more someone gets away with something, the more likely they are to repeat it.

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Now, some of you may think that I'm of the opinion that Bessler was a fraud. Well that's not the case. The truth is, there just seems to be no solid evidence on which to base a reasonable opinion.

Logically speaking, his wheels were nowhere even close to being proven genuine. But that doesn't make them fraud... just unproven.

And of course those that follow blind faith will not be swayed anyway... They're hard enough to sway with fact never mind logic.

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So what about the film then?

The British version will see Bessler as a cad, cheating and romancing his way through a twisted life to a bitter, lonely end.

The Hollywood version will be a testiment to truth and honour with Bessler dying a tragic hero to a world that wasn't ready for him... There will, of course, be two sequels and a spin-off tv series.

The Swedish version will be about a viking lumberjack who has mystical dreams about a land where giant wheels throw weights at each other... in black & white.

[erick]

"It seems to me that he may have written way too much about stuff that didn't work to have succeeded. "

Agreed. Furthermore it seems to me that all of the MTs are not diagrams of Bessler's wheel. None of them work nor do they correspond to any of the quotes from Bessler about the inner-workings of his wheel.

[DrWhat]

It would be even more incredible if Bessler never achieved his self moving wheels and was a fraud (etc, etc), yet because of the persistence of one of us and an unwavering belief in it's possibility that self motive power was achieved for the first time!

The truth is we may NEVER know whether Bessler was a fraud or not. We can only assume that he wasn't if one of us achieves success. If we do create a mechanism then unless we can somehow match the design to some "hidden clues" that Bessler left (if they exist), we won't know if we have done what Bessler did. There may be many ways to achieve the same result once the underlying principle is discovered.

[erick]

Look at the "clues" (the quotes from Bessler and other first hand observers). It's all there...