Possible Bessler's journey of thought

[kenfree]

I don't know if this has been discussed before, but I think it may be a useful approach. Trying to decipher Bessler's secret principle from his clues is turning out to be more tricky than I thought, may be even more difficult than trying to create a working mechanism from scratch, but they are the best of information we have about the principle.
On the other hand, I tend to think the journey to success in such creation has to have errors and it is in finding and understanding these errors that one can get to know how to achieve a working principle. Maybe the same clues that are supposed to help us are our undoing as they point out to us whenever we are straying into error rather prematurely, before we benefit from learning from the error. I think if you have been on this for some time you will discover how hard it is to work on what you know is in error, and the amazing energy you get when working on what seems to indicate light at the end of the tunnel. So I have chosen to ignore most of the clues( but keep them at the back of my head), and focus on Bessler's Errors. One of the best displays of his errors are what he;himself, said are errors-The MT drawings.
One approach is trying to get his thought line. Going through Bessler's MT drawings reveals some possible lines of thought he may have had in his over ten year quest. I don't know if the numbering of the drawings are meant to indicate the sequence of his work, but I have found a general flow of ideas from the earlier ones to the last ones. I would like to put this open for discussion and maybe the truth is hidden here. I have classified his drawings into various classes according to the possible objective while they were being designed.

a. MT 1 to MT 29: may have been designed with an objective to create an overbalanced machine using the common historical concepts. He may have tried various designs and used various materials and at the end he seemed to have concluded the following main point:
-Trying to create overbalance by the use of levers attached to the beams of the wheel or any other mechanism is bound to fail as long as the lever's motion, or the weight movements is a curve about the same axis of rotation of the wheel or an axis parallel to this. this would always result in those weights that are further from the wheels axis of rotation being less than those closer to the axis, thus balancing the wheel. This is quite evident in the way the proceeding drawings indicate an attempt to introduce a plane of rotation or movement of a weight at 90 degrees from the plane of rotation of the wheel.

b. MT 30 to MT 39: The objective here seemed to be- Creating overbalance by the use of a second plane of rotation or movement of the weight so as to overcome the problem whereby weights that are further from the wheel's center of rotation are less in number than those closer to the wheel's center of rotation. But here the problem now seemed to be the energy for causing the motion of the weights. It seemed that the designs required push to set the mechanisms working and also the same push to maintain the motion. Then he seemed to have come to the conclusion that he could use a weight to lift another, giving rise to MT 40.

c. MT 40 to MT 49 The strategy here seems to have changed from
creating overbalance on one side of the wheel to raising the wheels, center of mass from the central axis to a position somewhere between the axis and the wheel's upper periphery. If this could be retained despite the wheel's rotation, then the wheel would be unstable and rotate to try and gain stability. Somewhere along the way however, he seems to have wondered back to the overbalancing concept briefly possibly after coming across hitches. This mechanism of rising one weight along a vertical path using another seemed so practical. Somehow the idea of raising the Center of mass couldn't leave his head.But in his experiments, he may have realized that one would need a heavier weight to lift the lighter one or involve a long lever as indicated in MT 40 (lever or pendulum A), and eventually, the net result would be that the center of mass will remain either on the same level as the axis of rotation or lower. The rest of his research would be to seek for a mechanism to achieve this
In MT 40, the weight on A(lever or pendulum) would cause the rising of weight D.

d. Mt 50 to MT 61. He seemed to have tried the use of a pendulum either attached to the wheel's axis or to the wheel's periphery to cause the driving push either by itself or by causing the rising or movement of another weight.

e. MT 63 to MT 70: Here he seems to be making head way in his quest. This is shown by the way there is focus on one wheel design over several diagrams. All of these drawings seem to be various descriptions of one design, which means he was bent on implementing a mechanism which was in his head and seemed very promising. You can tell that after MT 70, he was proceeding from theoretical diagrams to practical ones in which he has to account for three dimensional space in his drawings. The concept seems to have involved a number of long pendulum which had to pass from one end of the periphery to almost the opposite end and he had to create space to allow them by-pass each other.

f. MT 71 to MT 122: It seems the promising idea he had, failed and the problem seems to be with the mechanical structures. In a way he always seemed to come back to the fact that the motion of the weights had to have continuous energy so as to move. He then maybe thought of using mercury to implement the same concepts, and thus resulting in a 'mercury version' of the previous wheels. Possibly the use of the flowing qualities of mercury would overcome some of the problems. But again it seems this lead to a dead end.

g. MT 123: Two possibilities here: either a brief break away from the long journey where he briefly considered a 'wild new idea' using a swinging pendulum. or an instance where he was experimenting on some principle. could be a 'lull before a storm' because what follows it seems to be like the 'home run' in a race where he gave his all.

h. MT 124 to MT 134: He seems to have gone through the previous ideas again analyzing the concepts in detail and conducting experiments to gauge the outcome of some of the mechanisms, but it seems again he failed.

i. MT 135 & MT 136: Seems to be the onset of the breakthrough. It may be here that he finally and figured the whole thing. Most likely as a sudden piecing Together of various experiments and designs from his previous work. MT 136 is likely an abstract piece of art, but not a real drawing of part of the mechanism.

j MT 137: Is most likely( if not definitely) The work of a decided and confident mind. At this point he had everything about the concept and even the design in place. the drawing may be either be abstract whereby it is a visual representation of some ideology or may be a technical map of some kind to pin point particular important points on the wheel's structure.

k MT 138, 139, 140 and 141: Are definitely some hidden description of some of the important parts or mechanism used in the wheel.

i. MT 142: This may be the closest diagram to his final working wheel. There is a convincing resemblance of this structure with his working wheels and it seems he may have been designing some internal structures and he was using this diagram to gauge how they would fit in.

m. MT 143: Seems to be a theoretical drawing of some of the machine parts, obviously excluding details maybe to avoid complexity or to hide the details. To me I sometimes view it as a front elevation of the wheel lying horizontally. This may be revealed by comparing the base of the structure to the base of the structure at MT 142.The vertical beam may infact be the wheel axle whereby the parallelogram is a structure which passes through the axle. Between the weights which can swing swiftly at 180 degrees, may be a straight rugged rod so that when the rod is moved downwards, or the parallelogram structure lifted maybe by the mechanism at MT 40, the weights swing swiftly upwards so as to lift the wheel's center of mass thereby destabilizing the wheel.
A closer view reveals a faint imprint of this structure onto MT 136. I don't know if this is an error of scanning or if it is the case with the originals. It that is the case, then it is a strong pointer that these two were on the same table. This is but, a wild thought though.

[Bill_Mothershead]

I can imagine everyone is out hunting down the MT drawings about now.

I a looking over at http://www.orffyre.com/mt.html

in particular for MT138 to MT141 but at

http://www.orffyre.com/mt121-143.html they seem to
just skip from 138 (toys page) to 142 (missing 139, 140, 141).
And, MT141 is not in real good shape = blurry.

Anybody got a different URL to some better/more complete drawings?


Nice post, kenfree. Need a while to take this all in.