I know I've covered this briefly in the past, but an email I received, suggesting the writer knew that Bessler's wheel was not permanently out of balance prompted me to rehearse my arguments against that conclusion again, here.
According to Johann Bessler, his wheel would begin to turn as soon as the brake was released. This statement is supported by witnesses. But some people have suggested that Bessler stopped the wheel at a certain point so that the wheel would begin to spin as described because it was stopped at a point where its internal mechanisms were in an overbalancing position.
However it is reported that the visitors to the wheel were allowed to stop and start the wheel as often as they wished, and I 'm sure that someone would have commented on the fact that the wheel had to be stopped in a certain position for it to begin to rotate of its own accord - and without a push - if that was the case.
If this spontaneous start was only possible when the wheel was in a certain position, then that implies there were what I might call flat spots during each rotation. If the wheel was only out of balance on either side of these flat spots then the wheel would turn unevenly, but the witnesses all noted the extreme evenness of its rotation.
Also when the wheel was lifting the weight of 70 pounds from the castle yard to the roof, the flat spots would have become much more obvious. In an unloaded rotation the impetus from the overbalancing portion of each rotation would carry the wheel over the flat spots but when under load they would be emphasised and, I repeat, the very even running of the wheel was noted, I think we can believe what Bessler told us, and that is that the wheel started spontaneously.
If a state of permanent imbalance existed in the first two wheels then the latter two wheels, capable of being rotated in either direction, would, with mirror image mechanisms, remain in a state of balance until manually started. This implies that rotation was generated by the movement of the weights, and the alternative mirrored set of mechanisms moving in reverse, might add a braking effect but not cancel the overbalancing caused by the forward moving set. So there were two effects present.
In the one way wheels, there was the initial overbalancing and secondly there was the result of rotation which repeated the overbalancing which had been present initially. In the two way wheels with the overbalancing not present initially, the mechanisms required to be in motion before they could begin to overbalance the wheel. The mirror image mechanisms would not achieve overbalance even when moving in reverse, but they did remove the permanent overbalance present in the one way wheels.
I think it is possible that with fewer mechanism the wheel might have experienced flat spots during rotation but we won't know for sure until some one builds one.
JC
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