One of the curiosities about this page of drawings for which I coined the name the ‘Toys’ page for want of a better word at the time, is the fact that it has not one number, but four. Moreover there are five separate drawings labelled A,B,C,D and E, and yet strangely an additional drawing done by hand rather than woodblock as the others are, is labelled 5.

Now we know that Bessler destroyed or hid some drawing which revealed the secret of his wheel and he is said to have replaced them with other more innocuous illustrations. I have always assumed that that the ‘toys’ page with its four numbers at the bottom represents the missing pages, but why bother to add four numbers? Why not just one for the whole page? Why label five drawings with five letters and then add a sixth and call it number 5? Why not 6 or ‘F’?

These thoughts passed through my mind for many years and I eventually came to the following conclusion which is based on what expertise I believe I have acquired over the years in understanding Bessler’s thought processes.

The four numbers handwritten at the lower left side of the Toys page, 138, 139, 140 and 141, appear to continue the run of numbers after 137, but were they written by Bessler? In my opinion, no. I have compared the writing in the rest of the MT and my findings follow.

There are just six numbers to compare; 0, 1, 3, 4, 8 and 9. Without exception all ‘1’s in MT are written with a dot on top, like a lower case ‘i’. The four ones written on the Toys page do not include the dot although one of them might have a single dot - it is hard to be sure.

The two ‘3’s certainly resemble some of the other ‘3’s in the MT but then in my opinion, they are more likely to do so, so we can make no assumptions in their case.

The ‘4’s also resemble some of the ‘4’s in the MT and again no decision can be made.’

The ‘8’s also resemble some of the ‘8’s found in the MT even, in one case having the same straight portion in the lower right quadrant, as is shown on the Toys page.

The ‘9’, however is different to those in the rest of the MT. The Toys page ‘9’ is much more neatly drawn and lacks the downwards left slash present in the all the other examples in MT.

The zeros look similar so one must make a decison based on the differences rather than the similarities. So because of the different ‘1’s and ‘9’s I think that Bessler did not write those numbers and therefore they cannot hold any clues to decipher. In addition, the numbers written on the Toys page lean slightly to the left whereas those of the rest of the MT have a distinct rightwards inclination.

Subsequent to my findings as described above, I have discovered a photograph of the Maschinen Tractate taken on a previous occasion and the four numbers are not present. This might, however, be due to the poorer photographic reproduction techniques available at the time.

For these reasons I am certain that Bessler did not write them.

For more information about Johann Bessler and to obtain copies of his books with English translations go to www.free-energy.co.uk

Copyright © 2009 John Collins