Speculation
The author does not believe in trying to explain the function of the Bessler wheel without taking classical mechanics into account. He therefore sees no reason to attempt metaphysics or to move entirely into the realm of fantasy. This early 18th century invention certainly did not utilize radiation from space and was not an example of “overunity.” As a down-to-earth person, Bessler worked exclusively within the scope of the technical possibilities of his time. The fact that his wheel was not caused to rotate by antigravity, levitation, scalar waves, vibrations, etc. is conclusive from the fact that eight impact noises were heard during one revolution and that the inventor prevented people present from seeing the inside of the wheel. He always installed a privacy screen and did so because the principle of operation could have been imitated by anyone. The process must therefore have been easy to understand visually. This assumption is supported by the statements of Landgrave Karl von Hesse-Cassel, who was the first and only person to see the secret mechanism in August 1717 and was surprised by its simplicity. He immediately understood the functional principle and was surprised that no one had come up with such a solution before. According to him, any apprentice carpenter could have built such a wheel.
However, you shouldn't be under the illusion that the matter can be solved in an afternoon with common sense and a little trial and error. It took Bessler 10 years to do this. A simple structure for which an apprentice's skills are sufficient does not automatically mean that he or she could develop the principle if it was not known before. Think, for example, of the pulley or the decimal scale - simple to manufacture, but nevertheless ingenious. Karl's statement is certainly not to be understood to mean that Bessler's drive was a simple, run-of-the-mill solution. The landgrave's impression may have been significantly influenced by the fact that everything in the wheel, which was twice as tall as a man, was very manageable and therefore seemed uncomplicated. However, Bessler probably tested all simple solutions in the first few months of his experimentation and checked them off as unsuitable. It was his achievement not to have given up, but to have ultimately overcome the difficulties that had caused everyone before and after him to fail. Difficulties that he long believed were caused by a curse. They are an indication that potential inventors are subject to similar thought patterns, which lead them to go down similar wrong paths again and again. The human mind is apparently overwhelmed by trying to figure out the functional principle of the Bessler wheel just by pondering. More than 300 years of unsuccessful efforts to rediscover this principle make a simple answer unlikely. And yet, it certainly didn't contradict established physics.
Since the entire wheel could be viewed unhindered from all sides (including from below), the viewers' primary attention was focused on the bearings because this was where one could most likely assume that power was being transmitted from the outside. This is regularly referred to in the reports of contemporary witnesses. ‘sGravesande in particular described things in great detail. According to him, the wooden axle of the bidirectional Bessler wheel had a diameter of 15 cm. It terminated on both sides in 3/4 inch thick iron axle journals which rotated in matching bushings. Very simple plain bearings, because ball or roller bearings did not yet exist in Bessler's time*). The bushings, which themselves rested on a wooden rack, were open so that the rotating axle journals could be seen. Without exception, the witnesses said that there was definitely no evidence of any power transmission from outside the wheel. Ropes, belts, gears and the like would have been discovered immediately.
*) Even though there were already methods of using balls to reduce friction in ancient times, the invention of the ball bearing by Philip Vaughan is now dated to 1791. He patented it in 1794. At this point, Bessler had already been dead for 49 years.
It can also be ruled out that vibrations, centrifugal forces, the gyroscopic effect or other phenomena observed on rotating bodies played a significant role. The Bessler wheel moved at 20 revolutions per minute (= 3 seconds for one revolution), simply too slowly.
Speculations about stamp mills or pendulums that are often heard are not scientifically backed. They were unnecessary for the funtioning of Bessler's wheel. Stamp mills were previously used, for example, to crush coal or ore. These were long, vertically arranged pieces of wood with a square cross-section that could move up and down in a duct. They had a nose on the side by which they were periodically (slowly) raised and (quickly) dropped again by a rotating camshaft. An iron head was attached to its lower end, which was strong enough to break the rock. Stamp machines with smaller dimensions have always been found on children's toys such as small water wheels or miniature steam engines. They demonstrate in a simple yet unmistakable way that physical work is being done here. Bessler didn't want to achieve more with it either. The stamping mill, with its pounding wood, showed that the rotating wheel could not only move itself endlessly, but that energy was also available for other purposes. During the 54-day endurance test in Kassel, the stamping mill enabled purely acoustic monitoring of its functioning without having to open the sealed room each time. However, during the test in the Green Court in Merseburg, definitely no ramming rods were in action. The entire power of the wheel was used to lift the bricks. The same thing happened when Bessler demonstrated the pumping of water using an Archimedean screw. The stamping mill would have weakened the wheel unnecessarily. The wheel of Gera could be pushed around as desired while running. There was no stamping machine on it because it was only 10 cm thick. The only 15 cm thick Draschwitz wheel, which, among others, was visited by Leibniz, also had no stamp mill nor pendulum.
When it comes to the pendulums, the author is convinced that Bessler wanted to give his wheel a more scientific look in the drawings in order to create more awe in the viewer. They are not mentioned at all in the witness reports. It is therefore questionable whether there were ever any pendulums on Bessler's wheel in reality. As oscillatory systems with their own resonance frequency, pendulums would not have promoted the movement of the wheel, but rather hindered it, because the latter rotated at different speeds depending on the load. Nevertheless, some Bessler-related websites credit the pendulum with breathtaking abilities. In individual cases it is even assumed that the oscillation of the pendulum and one of the stamping mills formed a synergy. As long as such ideas lack experimental evidence, they are pure fantasy.
In general, mechanical vibrations are slowed down by friction and air resistance, which is why one speaks of damped vibrations when there is no external energy supply. In order for a vibration to continue, energy must be constantly supplied to it from outside. It cannot therefore provide any itself and could not have been the cause of the movement of Bessler's wheel. After releasing the brake, the unidirectional wheel started moving on its own without a pendulum.
Amateur inventors are increasingly using simulation software to save themselves time-consuming experimentation. So far this has not been successful. Such programs are not (yet) able to calculate the infinite possibilities of arranging and moving masses in a wheel unless they are told where these masses should be placed and how they should be connected to each other. The user still has to do this themselves, and that's why it fails. If all you had to do was tell the software to reinvent the Bessler wheel, it would be easy.
Because of the aforementioned privacy screen that Bessler installed during demonstrations and which was intended to prevent imitation by others, everything that the human eye could not perceive can be ruled out. So no magnetism, no antigravity, no mysterious magic, etc. All known details suggest that the propulsion was provided by the force of gravity acting on moving bodies in the wheel. The solution sought is therefore “only” about answering the question of how these bodies were moved in the course of a complete rotation. To date, there is no serious evidence to support the kind of explanations that are repeatedly read, and which leave this aside, but instead make adventurous conjectures of a different kind.
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Since it is not possible to be certain by looking into an original Bessler wheel, one can only speculate about its function. The wheel that could turn in both directions and that is known to have run in Merseburg and Kassel is ideal. Significantly more details are known about this variant, while little is known about the unidirectional wheel. Although it is obvious that both made use of a similar principle of action, because of their different properties they must also have had a different mechanism.
The bidirectional wheel did not start by itself. It had to be given a low initial speed manually. It only spun about half as fast as its unidirectional predecessor. Presumably because it had to bridge several states of equilibrium during one revolution due to its inertia. These were necessary to allow the user to choose between left and right rotation. To do this, the wheel was first braked to a standstill before it could then be started again in the desired direction.
Since the bidirectional wheel was twice as thick as its predecessor, the author assumes that there were two levels of moving weights. It is obvious that this was a further development of the original wheel. This took Bessler ten years of development. It is inconceivable that he invented a completely new mechanism for its successor in Obergreißlau within a few weeks, especially since, according to his own statement, there could only be one possible operating principle for the gravitational drive. The double thickness could be explained by the fact that Bessler arranged two drives of the unidirectional wheel one above the other, with one being responsible for clockwise rotation and the other for counterclockwise rotation. If that was the case, 32 weights would have been used.
On page 90 of his Apologia, Bessler writes, “The poltergeists roam freely - often through locked doors.” This suggests a locking mechanism that controlled the clockwise and counterclockwise rotation of the bidirectional wheel. If two levels of the unidirectionally rotating wheel were arranged one above the other, one level must always have been deactivated depending on the direction of rotation. This fits the fact that Bessler let a visitor feel the wooden axle when he was inspecting the bidirectional wheel. Apparently he was allowed to reach past the oilcloth and into the inside of the wheel. He could feel that the axle had several holes. Bessler could have passed cords or thin chains through here, with which the presumed mechanism for controlling the direction of rotation was operated.
The dog also crawls out of the hut,
But only as far as the chain goes.
The beautiful treasures and machines
He knows how to serve in a very friendly manner.
According to witness Wolff, Bessler himself made no secret of the fact that his wheel was powered by weights. He showed around some of these weights in Merseburg and let visitors hold them in their hands. Each weighed approximately 4 pounds (2 kg). According to several consistent witness reports, eight impacts were heard during one revolution. From this it was concluded that there were also eight individual weights that “fell” cyclically inside. In this context, however, a free fall is very unlikely because it would involve large losses if one wanted to convert the kinetic energy into the rotation of a wheel by means of an impact. A significant portion of this energy would be lost through deformation and heating of the material involved. Instead of hitting the ground, the weights could have made the noise by rolling on an inclined plane and colliding at the end.
The argument for this “rolling theory” is supported by the fact that rumbling and scraping noises could be heard inside, such as those produced by solid bodies when they run along a wooden track. Nevertheless, rolling bodies (if they were the sole cause of the rotational movement) could not have moved on inclined planes simply because they were exclusively and directly exposed to gravity. This has already been explained in detail in the article “Unsuitable”. For this reason, all the well-known ball running machines did not work. Bessler must also have used another trick. Since no other forces apart from gravity were involved, the solution may have been that at least some of the weights were moved indirectly by gravity. This means that moving bodies were mechanically connected to others and their positions were changed by the latter in such a way that a recurring imbalance arose in the wheel.
The argument against the rolling theory is that the weights shown by Bessler were cylindrical. Rolling cylinders would immediately jam on wooden tracks. If the bodies had moved that way, Bessler would definitely have used spheres. Another argument against rolling is that a suitable body moves far too slowly on a moderately inclined plane. Since the unloaded bidirectional wheel rotated once in 2.2 seconds, with 8 weights each one didn't even have 300 milliseconds to move from near the center to the periphery, for example. Clearly not enough time for an inclined plane. (When returning from the outside to the inside, one can assume that it overlapped in time with the movement of another body.) A free fall would have provided enough acceleration, but the impact noise would certainly have been extremely loud. With it, more than with other approaches, one is further away from answering the question of how the weights were brought back up in such a way that not only eternal movement was guaranteed, but that energy was also available for other purposes.
By removing weights before changing the position of the wheel, Bessler not only reduced its overall weight, but in doing so he shifted the center of gravity of the wheel downwards. This minimized the risk that the structure, which was twice as tall as a man, could tip over while being carried. Even without the weights it would have been heavy enough for one person.