Newspaper Clipping of the Day

via Newspapers.com

The mystery around one very curious inventor was related in the (East Liverpool, Ohio) "Evening Review," July 18, 1940:

The murder of the "Flying Dutchman" 79 years ago remains one of East Liverpool's unsolved crimes.

The verdict of the jury, "We do find Christian Olsen met his death at the hands of a person or persons unknown" wrote the last chapter to the most intriguing story.

Christian Olsen, a Dane by birth came here early in 1861. He gave no explanation except that he wished to build a flying machine. Residents merely considered him eccentric and paid little attention to him until a large box of freight-bearing foreign shipping tags, arrived at the station.

The inventor rented an empty loft of a barn at Third and Broadway and, much to the amazement of the town people, began to build an ingenious machine which he called a "flying machine".

He became a man of mystery and was nicknamed "The Flying Dutchman." He didn't resent this appellation, in fact he rather liked it. Despite their amusement the people regarded him with awe and when they discovered he paid all his obligations with gold money, their awe became mixed with respect.

A few of the more intrepid villagers tried to break through the wall of reserve Olsen built about his activities, but to no avail. The barn became a mecca for curiosity seekers. After several unsuccessful attempts to question the Dane, no one dared intrude beyond the closed gate of the loft's door which opened on an outside staircase.

One chilly spring afternoon a group of school children came trooping down Broadway from the log school on Fourth st. It was their custom to stand and stare up at the loft where the flying machine was being built.

Some of the more daring boys even would venture up a step or two. This afternoon was no exception. The pupils were indulging in their usual game of speculation, when without warning, the gate of the loft swung open and Christian Olsen emerged on the platform and looked down at the children. He said nothing, but finally beckoned to one of the older boys to come up to the loft.

The boy, selected from the group, was an acknowledged leader of youth activities.

Despite his claims for courage his steps lagged noticeably as he climbed up to the loft. His legs grew weak and his heart pounded in an uncomfortable fashion. The Dane stood on the platform, a slight smile on his broad, pleasant face.

The children watched their comrade disappear into the cavernous depths of the loft. They were too frightened to talk. They waited breathlessly for his return and after what seemed to be an endless span of minutes some of the older boys decided to go after the boy's father and the village constable.

"Here he comes!" shouted one of the boys and a sigh of relief went up from the anxious waiters as their chum appeared, apparently unharmed.

From that day until the brutal murder of the inventor three months later the boy worked faithfully for Christian Olsen. He carried his meals to the inventor and was the only contact the Dane had with the village.

Months later, after the death of the "Flying Dutchman," June 4, 1861, the boy gave the only genuine account to be found of activities beyond that closed gate.

"I nearly was scared out of my wits," the lad related later, "when he closed and locked that gate. I nearly jumped out of the window. He asked me all kinds of questions and finally said he wanted a trustworthy boy who would get his meals, run errands for him and keep the loft clean. I was to hear nothing and tell nothing.

"Every week he paid me in gold. A number of strange men visited him. They were trying to get him to sell his machine which was one of the funniest things I ever saw. It seemed to have leather wings that worked with coils of springs which he wound up. He always seemed to be afraid of something happening to the machine and wouldn't trust anyone to touch it.

"Once in a while he left me in charge while he paid a short visit across the street at the home of Enoch Bullock. Then on the night of June 3. he said I might invite two of the boys to come in. The machine was completed. They came and he was excited and happy. He showed us how it worked.

"One or two strangers were there. He said they were his partners. After supper he cleared us out, locked up his shop and went down to the Black Bear tavern to celebrate. The next time I saw him he was in Doc Ogden's house. His body had been taken from the railroad track by Jackman, Frederick Mill (near the present Pennsylvania Railroad passenger station).

"He had been murdered in his shop and his body taken down and put on the tracks. I never saw the men who visited his shop again."

The murder caused a furor in the village, but no clues leading to his assailant ever were found. The machine was stored in an attic over Kefferts tin shop on Broadway and stayed there for 20 years. In 1892 it was destroyed partially by fire.

The Perpetual Motion of Johann Bessler

Johann Bessler

The idea of a “perpetual motion machine” is one that has proved an irresistible lure for humanity for centuries. The concept has attracted countless numbers of greedy fortune-seekers, idealistic humanitarians, amateur mechanics, scientific geniuses, cranks, and con-artists.  All were doomed to failure.

However, there was at least one person who made anything close to a credible claim of having achieved that goal. He was Johann Ernest Elias Bessler, who went by the considerably snappier name of “Orffryeus.” If he was right—and no one ever indisputably proved him wrong—he just may have done the impossible.

Orffryeus was born in Saxony in 1680. He was something of a polymath, turning his hand to theology, medicine, and painting, although he soon realized his true vocation was in the realm of mechanics. Around 1712, he began exhibiting a number of self-moving wheels of various sizes.

His contraptions attracted a good deal of attention. Unfortunately, it was virtually all of the negative variety. His machines were almost automatically dismissed as fraudulent. This was partly due to the natural human instinct to believe that because something had never been done before, it could never be done, and partly due to Orffryeus’ frankly obnoxious personality. Like so many people skilled with machinery, he had absolutely no talent dealing with human beings. He evidently so rubbed onlookers the wrong way, they did not want to think of him as anything other than an impostor. The result was that his creations failed to get the in-depth, serious study they possibly deserved.

In 1715, Orffryeus threw down the gauntlet to his detractors. He built his largest machine to date—it was six feet in diameter and a foot thick. He presented it to a committee of learned and respectable men and invited them to inspect it to their heart’s content. After examining the machine for nearly two months, they issued a certificate proclaiming it to be a genuine perpetual motion machine, capable of raising a box of stones weighing seventy pounds.

Orffryeus’ many enemies dismissed this report and continued to denounce him as a fraud, who claimed to do things that were clearly “contrary to nature.” And his machine continued to revolve.

The following year, Orffryeus settled in Hesse-Cassel, where he won the patronage of the local Landgrave. He was given the post of Town Councillor, and rooms in the Ducal castle of Weissenstein.

In 1717, for the benefit of his new protector, Orffryeus built his last and most impressive wheel, a machine twelve feet in diameter. A Professor Gravesend who examined the device later told Sir Isaac Newton of his conclusions. He wrote, “The inventor has a turn for mechanics, but is far from being a profound mathematician, and yet his machine hath something in it prodigiously astonishing, even though it should be an imposition.” After noting that Orffryeus forbade anyone from examining the internal parts of his machine, “lest anyone should rob him of his secret,” the Professor concluded that he was “firmly persuaded that nothing from without the wheel in the least contributes to its motion.”

A Baron Fischer, who was architect to the Emperor of Austria, also examined Orffryeus’ wheel. He stated, “Although I am very incredulous about things which I do not understand…I am quite persuaded that there exists no reason why this machine should not have the name of Perpetual Motion given to it.”

Diagram of one of the "Orffryeus Wheels"

The wheel remained on public exhibition for several months. It was examined carefully by a great many scientists, who all concluded that, somehow, Orffryeus had constructed the real deal. In October 1717, the wheel was transported to a room in Weissenstein “where there were no walls contiguous to it, and where one might go freely round it on every side.” When the wheel was set into motion, the Landgrave had all the doors and windows leading to the room securely fastened, with his seals placed over the locks.

Two weeks later, the seals were broken and the room unlocked. The wheel was still moving. The room was resealed as before. The wheel was then left untouched until January 1718.

When the room was opened, it was found that the wheel was spinning as regularly as before…

Probably the crowning irony of this story is the fact that, if Orffryeus is to be believed, he had created one of the most amazing inventions in human history—and he did not seem to have the slightest idea what to do with it. He apparently made little or no money off his exhibitions. He wished to keep the secret of his wheel to himself until he could profit from his discovery, but his efforts in that line were oddly muddled and half-hearted. If Orffryeus was merely a con man, he was a singularly poor one.

In 1714, England had offered a reward of £20,000 for anyone who could present a way to find longitude at sea. Orffryeus’ supporters proposed that a company should be formed in London to buy the secret to his wheel’s success. If this proved to indeed be the secret to perpetual motion, they felt sure the Crown would be happy to lavishly reward the inventor. If the wheel was proved fraudulent, the money would be returned.

The plan came to nothing, thanks to Orffryeus himself. He became angered by an examination of his machine that he erroneously felt was an effort to steal the secrets of the wheel without paying him for it. In one of history’s more notable acts of self-destruction, he smashed his wheel to bits in a fit of paranoid rage at this “impertinent curiosity.” One assumes he regretted this remarkably stupid act when he learned the next day that this last report on his machine had been entirely favorable.

After this virtual career suicide, Orffryeus gradually disappeared from public view. In 1727, it was reported that he was at work on a new wheel, but if this was the case, there is no record of it ever being exhibited. Orffryeus died in complete obscurity in 1745. Showing the same serio-comic weirdness that dogged his entire career, he fell to his death from a windmill he was constructing.

Orffryeus has gone down in history as either a particularly talented impostor, or sincere, but deluded madman. However, what we know of his machines leaves nagging little doubts about these harsh assessments. If he was a fraud, how did he do it? The tales that a person was somehow concealed inside the mechanism can be dismissed by the fact that the wheel was locked in a room for three months. Could he have operated the wheels through a hidden clock-spring? Doubtful. Any spring capable of moving a twelve-foot wheel for weeks on end would be too enormous to be concealed. Very many learned and honest men gave Orffryeus’ wheel a thorough and unbiased examination, and pronounced it to be genuine. They believed he had somehow found the secret to perpetual motion. But if he had, how on earth did this quarrelsome, unbalanced, utterly ordinary man make a discovery that had eluded so many other, worthier inventors?

Orffryeus himself made only one attempt to explain his wheel to the public. Unfortunately, it did absolutely nothing to clarify the mystery. His 1719 pamphlet describing his “Triumphant Orffyrean Perpetual Motion,” is an irritatingly vague, rambling work, one that seems rather more concerned with insulting his many enemies than with describing his invention. It reads like a man trying to describe forces he himself does not completely understand. He could only state that the secret of "everlasting motion" depended upon weights placed in such a way that they "never attain equilibrium." This gravity-defying process is considered by modern physicists to simply be against all laws of nature.

There is no reason to doubt that Orffryeus genuinely believed he had found the trick to perpetual motion—he just didn’t quite know how he did it. His pamphlet is reminiscent of an “idiot savant” struggling to explain how he instantly adds long strings of numbers in his head, or plays on the piano a Beethoven sonata he has only heard once. Or, possibly, considering his extreme paranoia, Orffryeus was being deliberately obfuscating.

Whether he was fraud, lunatic, or genius—or some combination of the three—Orffryeus remains one of the more intriguing oddities found in the world of science.