Throughout his life, Orffyreus eagerly sought after the perpetual motion. Like a thirsting deer, he hastened from village to village, from town to town; with giant strides, he pursued his way towards his destination. Orffyreus made public demonstration of his Gravity wheel at various town of Germany, Gera, Draschwitz, Merseberg, and Weissenstein, Kassel

      It is a very long and messy story that I intend to tell you in these web pages. Many books could be written about it, and in fact, many have appeared recently. The point of the story is that Orffyreus was genuine inventor of the gravity wheel and perpetual motion is possible. Unfortunately, it is a heresy in the orthodoxy of science. Nevertheless, the record indicates that Orffyreus (Bessler) built many over balancing wheels that successfully worked. Careful to hide its mechanism, he demonstrated it convincingly to critically qualified observers who were suitably impressed, though still unwilling to take it at face value. His object was simply to sell the secret rather than reveal it for nothing so that he could run a institute “Fortress of the God”; but he could find no one interested enough to pay his price, so on 12 November 1712 he eventually destroyed the machine at the Castle of Weissenstein.

      Orffyreus, a true adventurer of the perpetual motion is probably the greatest and most disturbing, perhaps the only magical inventor of perpetual motion in eighteenth century in the Western world. Orffyreus understood the allure of the occult and he overcame its temptations through great personal effort by channelizing his energies into the search of perpetual motion. In addition, the prolonged solitude he experienced in nature strongly heightened his inner mystic propensities. A frequenter of Rabbi Circles, he had already cultivated and trained his psychic powers before he had an invigorating dream that helped him to invent perpetual motion. The larger world has yet to do him justice and recognize that he was a genius. It is unfortunate that the majority of scientists still consider him as a trickster. Notwithstanding scientists’ false judgment, I must also regret the faults in his character that leads to create false perception of him in the minds of casual readers. We find in his life the lack of fostering amicable social relationships, in his writings we find exaggerations in making complaints about his enemies, often abusing them; we find in his works his lack of skill in developing a theoretical framework of perpetual motion. However, we cannot blame Orffyreus for his lack of erudite and sophistication. Orffyreus is a type of individual for whom a lively interest in scholarship remained secondary to a perpetual motion quest involving his whole ‘being’. His case seems particularly interesting to us due to his life long and profound stay at the perpetual motion.

( Note: Refreshing the home page brings you each time randomly a different image of Orffyreus, in colour as well as black and white.)