Geschichten aus der Geschichte · Richard Hemmer und Daniel Meßner

GAG547: Orffyreus und das Perpetuum Mobile

·55 min·4 clips

When Robert Fulton inspected Charles Redheffer's famous 1813 perpetual motion machine, he found threads running to an adjacent room — where a man sat on a stool, nibbling a slice of bread and turning a crank with his other hand.

1. Geschichten aus der Geschichte episode 547 tells the story of Johann Ernst Elias Bessler, who built a claimed perpetual motion wheel in the early 18th century and attracted the interest of Leibniz, Newton, and Peter the Great. 2. Host Daniel narrates the episode to co-host Richard, who has no prior knowledge of Bessler or the perpetual motion machine at the centre of the story. 3. The episode opens with Robert Fulton — inventor of the first commercially successful steamboat (the Clermont, 1807) and the submarine Nautilus (1800) — visiting a 1813 New York exhibition where Charles Redheffer claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine; Fulton identified the machine was running backwards and found a man in an adjacent room turning a crank while eating bread. 4. Daniel defines perpetual motion — a machine that, once started, runs indefinitely without additional energy — and notes the German Patent and Trademark Office still receives around 100 such applications per year; the Paris Académie des Sciences declared in 1775, on Jean d'Alembert's advice, that it would no longer examine perpetual motion claims. 5. The episode's 'golden age of perpetual motion' is placed at 1700–1750, when alchemy and early science overlapped: absolutist princes wanted machines to power garden fountains and mine water pumps, and the laws of thermodynamics had not yet been formulated. 6. Johann Ernst Elias Bessler was born in 1680 near Zittau in Saxony (today near the Polish-Czech border), the son of a farmer; he showed mathematical and mechanical talent, attended gymnasium through a patron's support, but lacked funds for university and spent years as a travelling craftsman and quack doctor. 7. Bessler was inspired to build a perpetual motion machine after seeing a mechanical spit-roaster driven by a windmill in a chimney — in which the rising hot air appeared to turn the spit without any visible energy input, a phenomenon that seemed to demonstrate free mechanical work. 8. He took the pseudonym 'Orffyreus' by applying a Caesar cipher shifting each letter of 'Bessler' 13 places forward in the alphabet — a method with mystical resonance because placing 26 letters in a circle makes a 13-step shift equivalent to landing on the directly opposite letter. 9. From 1712 Bessler settled in Annaberg, Thuringia, after curing the mayor's daughter and marrying her; he first exhibited a perpetual motion machine in Gera in 1712, followed by demonstrations in Draschwitz (1713), Merseburg (1715), and elsewhere, each time with larger wheels, attracting both admirers and critics who called him a charlatan. 10. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz personally inspected one of Bessler's machines; the Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel, whose court included Denis Papin (pioneer of steam technology and inventor of the predecessor of the pressure cooker), invited Bessler to his castle. 11. In autumn 1717 at Castle Weissenstein (today Schloss Wilhelmshöhe), Bessler installed his largest wheel — 3.5 metres in diameter, fitted with levers and an Archimedean screw — in a sealed room; present were architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (designer of Schönbrunn Palace and the Vienna Karlskirche) and mathematician Willem 's Gravesande, a student and friend of Isaac Newton. 12. The room was sealed for six weeks; when reopened, the wheel was still turning; the Landgrave issued a signed attestation dated May 27, 1718 confirming the wheel had run without intervention from November 12 for two months. 13. In his published work 'Triumphans Perpetuum Mobile,' Bessler claimed the wheel could drive mills, pump mine water, lift loads, drain swamps, and power garden fountains; he demanded 100,000 thalers — not for the machine but for the secret of how to build it. 14. 's Gravesande reported to Isaac Newton that he had been unable to inspect the machine's interior but had found no signs of external power; the London Royal Society, acting on this report, declined to purchase the machine. 15. Peter the Great had hired a Prussian architect in 1713 to build his own perpetual motion machine; hearing of Bessler through Leibniz in 1716, he sent his Vice-Chancellor to Merseburg — but Bessler had moved to the Landgrave's service, and political considerations involving Hesse-Kassel's Swedish alliance ended negotiations. 16. In 1721, shortly after Fischer von Erlach and 's Gravesande were commissioned to evaluate the machine for a possible purchase, Bessler dismantled or destroyed the wheel, claiming 's Gravesande had tried to reveal its secret without payment. 17. In 1727, Bessler's former servant Anna Rosine Mauersberg swore under oath that a crank connection to an adjacent room had powered the wheel, operated in rotation by herself, Bessler's wife, and his brother at two groschen per hour; 's Gravesande publicly defended Bessler, stating the mechanism she described could not have been there based on what he observed. 18. Bessler died in 1745, reportedly falling from a windmill he was building, without ever revealing the wheel's mechanism; his patron the Landgrave Karl died in 1730; the machine no longer existed, making definitive proof of fraud impossible. 19. The episode appeals to listeners drawn to the history of science, pre-modern technology, fraud investigations, and the cultural history of the period between alchemy and the Industrial Revolution. 20. Listeners expecting a resolution to whether Bessler was a genuine inventor or a fraud will find the episode deliberately leaves the question open, as the surviving evidence is fundamentally ambiguous.

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