On November 2, the German alchemist, physician, mechanic, and legendary swindler-adventurer Johann Ernst Elias Bessler, known as Orffyreus, demonstrated in the presence of renowned physicists to his patron, Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel, a “perpetual motion machine” he had invented. Everything was arranged in a very respectable manner. Bessler-Orffyreus set his “invention” in motion. After the machine was started, it was locked up, and when it was checked two weeks later, it turned out that the wheel was rotating at the same speed as before. Two months later the test was repeated. The wheel was still spinning, and its speed had not decreased by a single revolution. When the general public learned of this, Orffyreus’s fame thundered across Europe.
But he carefully concealed the secret of his device. The inventor wanted to sell his “perpetual motion machine” for one hundred thousand thalers (about two and a half million dollars at today’s exchange rate) and refused to reveal the secret of the invention to anyone before the sale. At the slightest suspicion, at the slightest hint that someone wanted to steal the secret, Johann Bessler destroyed drawings and prototypes and moved to another city. It is no wonder that many considered him a fraud or a madman. Over seven years of active experimentation, Bessler built more than three hundred prototypes of two models of a “perpetual motion machine.”
In the first prototypes, the wheel rotated only in one direction, and stopping it required considerable effort; in later ones, the shaft could turn in either direction and stopped quite easily. Any of Bessler’s designs was not merely energy self-sufficient. There was enough energy to perform some kind of work as well: for example, lifting weights.
In 1727, his maid claimed that all of Bessler’s mechanisms were driven manually. Later, the maid’s testimony was deemed unreliable, but the inventor’s reputation was irreparably ruined.
In the following years, all attempts by the inventor to sell his creation by disguising it as devices more familiar to ordinary people (a self-playing organ, an inexhaustible fountain, etc.) were unsuccessful. Whether Bessler was a fraud, a brilliant engineer, or a madman is probably impossible to know now. The operating principles of his engines are not known for certain. Nevertheless, even today many believe that Johann Bessler managed at the beginning of the eighteenth century to build a “perpetual motion machine,” whose secret vanished into oblivion along with its creator.