The drop bar A's [with the ..v.. bar] appear alongside the ordinary A's in Bessler’s MT treatise - sometimes both types appear in the same drawings – it is difficult [for me] to find a pattern in their placement or for anyone to guess why both types appear in the same drawing, unless you conclude by purposeful design.
There is little doubt in my mind that it is a strong clue & not of a random nature - there is no need to mix them up, particularly in the same woodcut engraving -
Bessler engraved his own plates so a repeated mistake is unlikely - we are creatures of habit so once a writing style is learnt it is difficult to change on a whim unless done purposefully & coincidence is not an option with Bessler – MT was to be the culmination of his life’s work, a record for posterity as well as a scientific text for his planned school of mechanics so accuracy would have been important.
Stewart makes the point that he found a drop A in part of an old drawing about alchemy [follow his link a little earlier & reproduced below], describing the elements of fire, earth, water, air - vegetable, mineral, animal - etc [i.e. the three kingdoms & their constituent elementals] & that it was part of the symbolism of the alchemists – they were known to work into their drawings complex geometric messages as well as symbolic ones - some of these alchemists would most certainly also have been Freemasons - and it looks like Karl, Bessler's patron, was a Freemason but Bessler was excluded, but he was an alchemist - additionally we know Newton & Desaguliers were [both overt detractors of Bessler], so perhaps Bessler couldn’t resist rubbing it in right under their noses when all was later to be revealed ?
http://www.besslerwheel.com/forum/viewt ... =2211#2211
While it has been postulated that the drop A’s were a hint at a code, possibly derived from Hebrew or Jewish connections after Bessler had formed a friendship with a rabbi friend in Prague & where he learnt the ‘atabash code’ for instance, & that may have a degree of truth to it; I think it more likely that the drop A’s were a direct & pointed connection to the alchemists & their multi-level inner geometry & symbolism messages – i.e. as related to Bessler’s inner mechanism contained in his wheels – it may well have related in a straight forward way to the method of overbalancing he used in some previous examples of his wheels ?!
N.B. when taken at face value the drop A has a direct physical appearance to both the scissor mech & the hammer men pantographs/parallelograms of the toy page, which we know Bessler supplanted in his MT treatise to probably replace the ‘tell all’ drawings he removed & burned or buried – as a side note & further speculation, they have a curiously similar action to imagined folding X’s & we know they were peppered all thru AP, an earlier work.
So, the drop A’s whilst could at one level be a hard to decipher code it is more likely IMO that they are a literal physical description of part of Bessler’s mechanism – the interesting thing about pantographs & parallelograms is that with their deployment they change geometry – take the scissor for example, it gets narrower while elongating & visa versa - the drop A could represent just one section of that same basic action – the action is also a type of rudimentary gearing or leverage arrangement where work done equals force times distance moved – while there is no magic there in & of itself it could hint nonetheless at fundamental basic method, popular of his period, to shift something around within a wheel that was both reasonably robust & reliable – it certainly probably was simpler to use & construct than linear gears or ropes & pulleys which have their own engineering weaknesses to contend with that a long duration test might subject them too.
