In 1721, 's Gravesande became involved in a public controversy over whether the German inventor Johann Bessler, known as Councillor Orffyreus, had created a genuine perpetual motion machine. 's Gravesande at first argued for the feasibility of perpetual motion based on the conservation of the scalar quantity "mv" (mass multiplied by speed), which he erroneously believed was implied by Newtonian mechanics. However, in 1722 he published the results of a series of experiments in which brass balls were dropped from varying heights onto a soft clay surface. He found that a ball with twice the speed of another would leave an indentation four times as deep, from which he concluded that the correct expression for the "live force" of a body in motion (what is modernly called its "kinetic energy") is proportional to "mv"2.