Johann Ernst Elias Bessler was born, according to his birth records as simply Elias Bessler. At, or around, the time that he adopted his pseudonym, Orffyreus, he also added the two extra forenames, Johann Ernst. To discover why, we need to look at the way he created his pseudonym, Orffyreus.

Atbash is a simple substitution cipher originally used by Hebrew scribes to disguise the names of certain people they mentioned in the books of the Old Testament. Besides the Hebrews it has often been used for encoding messages by various goverments and organsisations as well as individuals. It involves substituting A, for instance, with Z; B for Y, and so on, Alternatives include placing the first half of the alphabet beneath the second half and substituting the one above for the one below and vice versa.

Bessler used the same system to make his pseudonym, Orrfyreus, substituting the coloured letters in the box above or below with their adjacent letters

A B C D E F G H I/J K L M N O P Q R S T U/V W X Y Z

The German alphabet consisted of 24 letters but two of them had alternatives as you see above U/V and I/J. This makes no difference to the Atbash cipher result but has ramifications later when we discuss Bessler’s use of alphanumerics to encode information.

I suspected that Johann Bessler might have used this system to provide a pointer to the fact that he used other ciphers elsewhere, so I systematically acquired and translated copies of all of his documents. I discovered that he had indeed left coded messages elsewhere; everywhere in fact. Each and every one of the documents that he published during his life contain small pieces of information which were designed to provide hints for building a replica of his extraordinary machine. I am convinced that there remains a large portion of text within which he addressed the actual construction of his machine, but the majority of the clues found so far express just one very important feature of his wheel.

This machine was nothing less than a perpetual motion machine although these days we would refer to it as a gravity-wheel, a gravity-mill, a gravity converter or even a self-moving wheel. I use the word ‘wheel’ for the simple reason that that is how all of the witnesses to the machine referred to it in their many letters and reports about the machine.

For further information about this man, visit my other web site where full details of his life as well as a list of books by and about Bessler can be obtained www.free-energy.co.uk

 
 
Copyright © 2009 John Collins.