I’m rounding out the second-to-last week of a month of daily posts without anything lined up. To fill the gap, I decided it was time to get back to this feature. As it happens, there is one particular subject I have been thinking about recently, an incident from the formative days of modern science never fully explained, at least to the usual uneven standards of Forteans. I present the tale of Orfyrreus, a man who claimed to have found perpetual motion.
Our story begins in 1712 in a modest-sized German town, when an inventor appeared with a strange machine. His real name was Bessler, but by occult practices, he converted that into the suitably mystical name Orfyrreus. His machine was a large wheel, variously reported as six feet in diameter, that appeared to run entirely on its own power. Naturally, the mechanism was covered at almost all times, leaving it to the inventor to explain its workings. He maintained that his creation was nothing less than a perpetual motion machine, purportedly based on the principle of the overbalancing wheel, which even at the time had been investigated and largely disproved by the likes of Leonardo DaVinci. Nevertheless, he attracted enough interest from aristocratic donors and certain skeptical but interested observers to forge ahead with a series of larger machines, culminating in a colossal 12-foot wheel. His machines were run and carefully observed for weeks and months at a time, until even the skeptics agreed that a hidden human operator or other simple fraud was largely ruled out, notwithstanding the emergence of a disgruntled servant who claimed to have been just that. Alas, this and other setbacks were too much for the temperamental self-described genius, who finally destroyed the machine and disappeared into obscurity, leaving a mystery for generations to follow.
The case of Orfyrreus has long stood out to me first and foremost as the kind of anecdote that would be long forgotten if it didn’t fascinate anomalists like catnip. I first heard of it in a publication by Rupert Gould in 1928, then again from Colin Wilson in the 1980s (previously consulted on the case of Kaspar Hauser). What’s of further note is that it has never quite fallen into the realm of contrived supernaturalism that surrounds many purported mysteries. Nobody has suggested that the invention was either driven or inspired by paranormal agencies and influences, nor do the apologists necessarily argue that it was based on a technology unknown to later science. If anything, the favorite hypothesis has been that the inventor discovered a form of electricity or some other comprehensible power source, which can at least be considered as an factor in the bare belief that perpetual motion was possible. Much of the further fascination rises from the inventor, who by all accounts was so eccentric, paranoid and socially inept that many before and since considered him literally insane. The usual stated or implied dilemma is why someone so singularly unsuited to deception put so much time and effort into an invention he knew was a fraud.
Unfortunately, as with Hauser, this whole posited conundrum rises from dated conceits. On consideration, the romantic fiction of the polished and charming con man fares little better than that of a mysterious waif who must be royalty. On a certain level, it is only a flip side to the far more dangerous assumption that the mentally ill are incapable of guile and deceit. In reality, delusion and paranoia overlap with willful fraud so heavily it’s almost a chicken/ egg paradox, while the intelligent, empathetic “neurotypical” is in many ways the most vulnerable to their persuasions. Furthermore, it’s quite routine in science and academia in particular for elaborate and costly hoaxes to be carried out with no more than limited chance for material gain. The one real caveat in order is that offenders at this level tend to show a measure of belief in whatever they are trying to “prove”, making them more like fanatics than conventional charlatans.
With all that in mind, the central fact that emerges is that Bessler/ Orfyrreus is by any standard among the most devious minds on record. Whatever he may have lacked in personal graces, he more than made up for in convoluted deceptions, to the point that what can be known of his machine looks very much like diversions from other diversions. The whole posited theory of his machine was nonsense, and he was more than clever enough to know or suspect as much. (In a quick search for this piece, I found a video, unfortunately since removed from public view, demonstrating that the overbalanced wheel is in fact less functional than a regular wheel.) By my own further assessment, what it really offered was an excuse to put in a lot of complicated parts that could be presented to anyone shrewd enough to demand to see its insides. On top of that, the purported overbalancing mechanism appears to have generated a good deal of noise, perhaps drowning out other sounds that might have given away the actual power source. If it comes to that, the whole thing could in some lights be considered a parody of the perpetual motion machine, raising a dim possibility that it was at least initially a prank at the expense of the aristocracy and the still-new scientific “establishment”.
That brings us to in many ways the oddest part of the affair, the maidservant who might have discredited the machine. The lowly peon insisted that she and other staff and family were instructed to drive the wheel with a simple crank kept in a separate room from the machine. On neutral appraisal, however, this explanation is nearly too good to be true. The glaring problem is that the servant was unable to offer more than a vague explanation how this mechanism was connected to the machine, or especially how it went undetected in repeated inspections. In an unfortunate further irony, more thoughtful skeptics have had little trouble envisioning ways the wheel could have been driven by a conventional clockwork mechanism contained within itself. Thus, even the skeptical case would almost be stronger if the servant’s testimony were set aside, yet the problem reminds why she would invent the story, outside of personal malice or coercion. In my opinion, the simplest explanation is that Orfyrreus ordered the servant to work the machinery she described whether it had anything to do with the wheel or not. It sounds illogical, counterproductive and cruel, and it is, but the more I have studied the inventor, the less I can discount it as something he might have done simply as one more distraction.
Finally, we come back to the central problem of motive. If the skeptics are right, Orfyrreus must be counted as among the most skilled and intelligent minds of his time, certainly capable of work far more profitable than his wheel ever was. The real problem is that they might be giving the inventor and the technology of his time a little too much credit. A recurring lesson of perpetual motion schemes is that it’s not that hard to make a well-machined wheel run for a very long time with only a little initial input, especially in a small-scale demonstration. Doing it with hand-crafted parts in a wheel the size of a naval screw, however, is a problem of a literally different magnitude. Meanwhile, the one scenario that might let us take the inventor on good faith is that he discovered something that he couldn’t develop or even understand without far more time and funding. Granting this very charitable scenario, the whole wheel scheme and all of its layers of faulty theory or flat lies could have been devised simply to get the money without admitting either what he knew or didn’t know about his actual discovery. What is truly disturbing is that, if this didn’t happen here, it certainly could have for any number of inventors with the intelligence or luck to make discoveries ahead of their time.
In closing, the most
interesting aspect of the history of perpetual motion machines is what now seems
the total distortion of reason and the burden of proof. The most insightful
comment I have seen is a comment from a charming, sometimes chilling book titled
Complete And Utter Failure: “What is most interesting about the
perpetual motionists is the surprising sameness with which they present their discoveries.
Whether in 1400 or 1900, there is a sly I’ve-got-something-wonderful-but-I-can’t-quite-show-you-because-you’ll-steal-it
interplay that keeps the device just out of view of the skeptical observer.” It
now seems entirely perverse that those who claimed to do what was deemed
literally impossible could once dictate the terms of the simplest investigation
of their claims, but this was in fact the norm until peer-reviewed science became
the norm. It was the resulting paranoia that kept science from advancing
through the Medieval and Renaissance eras, more than ignorance, superstition or
conflicts with the church. The case of Orfyrreus should be a further reminder how
easy it is for supposedly “modern” minds to go over the edge. A historic
mystery is good fun, but when it requires considering whether a potential
psychotic was in the right, it’s time to move on.
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