Johann Ernst Elias Bessler (1680 – November 30, 1745) was an entrepreneur who demonstrated a series of devices he claimed exhibited perpetual motion.
Bessler was born in the town of Zittau in Saxony, Germany in 1680. In 1712 he appeared in the town of Gera in the province of Reuss and exhibited a “self-moving wheel”, which was about 6½ ft (2 m) in diameter and 4 inches (10 cm) thick. Once in motion it was capable of lifting several pounds.
Leaving Gera, Bessler moved to Draschwitz, near Leipzig, where in 1713 he constructed an even larger wheel, a little over nine feet (2¾ m) in diameter and six inches (15 cm) in width. The wheel could turn at fifty revolutions a minute and raise a weight of forty pounds (18 kg). Bessler constructed a still larger wheel in Merseburg before moving to the small independent state of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel), where Prince Karl, the reigning Landgrave, offered him rooms in the ducal castle at Weissenstein. It was here that in 1717 he constructed his largest wheel so far, 12 feet (3.7 m) in diameter and 14 inches (36 cm) thick.
The wheel was examined by many of Johann Bessler’s contemporaries, including Willem Gravesande and Gottfried Leibniz, who concluded that it was not a deception. The wheel was locked in a room in the castle on 12 November 1717, with the doors and windows tightly sealed to prevent any interference. This was observed by the Landgrave and various officials. Two weeks later the seals were broken and the room was opened; the wheel was still revolving. The door was resealed until 4 January 1718, whereupon it was opened and the wheel was still revolving at twenty-six revolutions per minute.
In a letter to Sir Isaac Newton, Willem Gravesande described the device as a hollow wheel with framed wood cross pieces, covered by canvas to prevent the mechanism from being seen. Gravesande reported that, when pushed, the wheel took two or three revolutions to reach a maximum speed of around 25 revolutions per minute.
Whilst various institutions, including the Royal Society, were debating whether to raise funds to purchase “Orffyreus’ Wheel” (for which he demanded twenty thousand pounds), William Gravesande examined the axle of the wheel, concluding that he could see no way in which the wheel could be a fake. Bessler smashed the wheel, believing Gravesande was hoping to discover the secret of the wheel without paying for it, and declared that the curiosity of the professor had provoked him.
Later life
Bessler and his machine vanished into obscurity. It is known that he was rebuilding his machine in 1727 and that Gravesande had agreed to examine it again, but it is not known whether it was ever tested. Bessler died in 1745, aged sixty-five, when he fell to his death from a four and a half story windmill he was constructing in Fürstenburg.
Mechanism of movement
By the first law of thermodynamics, it must be concluded that the wheel was a well-disguised fake.
One contemporary stated[who?] that Bessler had been a clockmaker at some point, and suggested that some sort of spring mechanism was hidden inside the axle of the wheel. The test in which the wheel was left running in a sealed room for three months, and the thin width of the earlier wheels, ruled out the proposal that a man may have been hidden within the device.
In 1727 Bessler’s maid, Anne Rosine Mauersbergerin, testified that his machines had been turned manually from an adjoining room. (Her testimony was rejected both by the court and earlier when a wheel was translocated to another support with open and visible bearings). Gravesande wrote that he believed Bessler was “mad” but not such an obvious fraud.
In 1719 Bessler himself published a pamphlet, entitled The Triumphant Orffyrean Perpetual Motion, in which a vague account of his principles is included[1]. He suggested that the wheel depended upon weights, placed so that they can “never obtain equilibrium”.
The philosopher Christian Wolff who viewed the wheel in 1715 wrote that Bessler freely revealed that the device utilized weights of about 4 pounds. Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach, who viewed the wheel in 1721, reported that “At every turn of the wheel can be heard the sound of about eight weights, which fall gently on the side toward which the wheel turns.”
The Marquis of Worcester proposed that the device was an “overbalancing wheel”, a wheel with two rims, one inside the other. The weights on the outer rim outweigh the weights on the inner rim on the opposite side, so that side descends. As the weights begin to rise again under their own momentum, some mechanism transfers them onto the inner rim, where they are nearer the centre of the circle and thus lighter in effect than those on the descending outer rim. The weights rise to the top, and are again transferred to the outer wheel. However, such a device would not function; the outer rim is longer than the inner rim, so there is less torque on the descending rim than on the other side. This results in the two sides counterbalancing each other, and the wheel stopping. Moreover, a strict application of Newton’s law reveals that an “overbalancing wheel” can’t be constructed.
Provided with permission by Wikipedia®