Orffyreus

Johann Ernst Elias Bessler (ca. 1680 – November 30, 1745), known as Orffyreus or Orffyré, was a German entrepreneur who claimed to have built several perpetual motion machines. Those claims generated considerable interest and controversy among some of the leading natural philosophers of the day, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Bernoulli, John Theophilus Desaguliers, and Willem 's Gravesande. The modern scientific consensus is that Bessler perpetrated a deliberate fraud, although the details of this have not been satisfactorily explained.

Bessler was born to a peasant family in Upper Lusatia, Germany, circa 1680. He completed secondary schooling in Zittau and then travelled widely. An alchemist instructed him on the fabrication of elixirs and he found work as a healer. He was also an apprentice watchmaker until his fortunes improved when he married a wealthy woman in Annaberg.

Bessler adopted the pseudonym "Orffyreus" by writing the letters of the alphabet in a circle and selecting the letters diametrically opposite to those of his surname (what would modernly be called a ROT13 cipher), thus obtaining Orffyre, which he then Latinized into Orffyreus. That was the name by which he was generally known thereafter.

In 1712, Bessler appeared in the town of Gera in the province of Reuss and exhibited a "self-moving wheel," which was about 6½ ft (2 m) in diameter and 4 inches (10 cm) thick. Once in motion it was capable of lifting several pounds. Bessler then moved to Draschwitz, a village near Leipzig, where in 1713 he constructed an even larger wheel, a little over nine feet (2¾ m) in diameter and six inches (15 cm) in width. That wheel could turn at fifty revolutions a minute and raise a weight of forty pounds (18 kg).

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