Johann Bessler

Johann Ernst Elias Bessler, 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.