Richard William Pearse

Born: 3 December, 1877, in Waitohi, near Temuka
Died: 29 July, 1953, in Christchurch

Early Life

• Richard Pearse’s parents were Digory Sargent Pearse and Sarah Browne.
• They had nine children, including Richard who was the fourth child.
• All of the family were good at tennis, chess and music and together they formed a family orchestra. Richard played the cello.
• Richard’s parents farmed a large property at Waitohi, then a rugged and isolated part of South Canterbury.
• Richard was quiet and independent at school, but a keen reader who would day-dream in class sometimes.
• When he was sixteen Richard left school to work on the family farm, but he did not like farming. He wanted to go to university and study engineering but his father could not afford to send him.
• Richard was given a 100-acre block of land when he turned 21, but instead of farming, he built a workshop with a forge and a lathe, and began building his own inventions.

Adult Life

• Richard Pearse’s first invention to receive a patent was a type of bicycle, where the pedals were pushed up and down, rather than around, and the tyres could be pumped up while still riding. But his real interest lay in flying.
• Pearse began working on ideas for powered flight in the last years of the nineteenth century. He kept in touch with what was happening in the world of flight by reading the magazine Scientific American.
• By 1902 Pearse had probably built his first lightweight two-cylinder engine. He then built his first plane out of bamboo, tubular steel, wire and canvas, and would practise taxiing it around his paddocks.
• Pearse made his first public attempt at flight along the Main Waitohi Road, and after staying in the air for about 50 metres, crashed into a gorse fence. (Pearse was not very good at farming and his gorse fences were about 3 metres high).
• Although there is no official record of this attempt at flight, eye witness accounts and other evidence suggest that it took place on 31 March 1903 (or even possibly 1902).
• What Pearse achieved was a powered takeoff, not controlled and sustained flight. His was the fifth successful powered takeoff to have taken place anywhere in the world.
• Pearse did not believe he flew properly, leaving that to the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, who flew on 17 December 1903 at Kittyhawk in the United States.
• Pearse applied to patent his aircraft design in 1906 and continued his attempts to fly.
• A number of eyewitness accounts tell of seeing his plane leaving the ground on several different occasions, but it is not certain if any of them could be described as true flight, that is, flying under control for a reasonable length of time.
• Pearse kept more and more to himself. He was known locally as “Mad Pearse” and “Bamboo Dick”, and never married.
• In 1911 after becoming very ill with typhoid, Richard Pearse moved to a farm near Milton in South Otago where he carried on inventing, designing and making several pieces of farm equipment.
• He was conscripted into the army in May 1917 and was sent overseas in January 1918, but fell ill and returned to New Zealand later that year.
• In 1921 Pearse moved to Christchurch where, after building three houses, he began designing what he called his “Utility Plane”. The patent for this was granted in 1949.
• The Utility Plane had a tilting engine to allow for vertical take-off and landing, and Pearse hoped it would one day become a plane which everyone could afford and fly, taking off from a backyard anywhere.
• Unable to attract interest from aircraft companies to further develop his Utility Plane, Richard Pearse became obsessed with the idea that people were trying to steal his inventions.
• Pearse was admitted to Sunnyside Mental Hospital in Christchurch in June 1951. He died there on 29 July 1953 after a heart attack. He was 75 years old.

Aftermath

• Richard Pearse’s early achievements were almost forgotten until after his death when his last plane was retrieved from his garage and put into storage.
• After some years it was rediscovered by George Bolt, a former aviation engineer who bought the aircraft for the Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT) in Auckland.
• Bolt began to look more closely into Richard Pearse’s life and eventually a few remains of Pearse’s inventions, including the engine and propellor from his first plane and a home-made motor-cycle were found.
• A replica of his first aeroplane was built and tests proved it would have been able to fly. It is on display at MOTAT in Auckland.
• A memorial to Richard Pearse was unveiled on 31 March 1979 at Waitohi.

Summary

Richard Pearse was an inventor of great ingenuity and imagination. His first plane looks very like a modern micro-light in appearance. As well as his planes, he designed and built a number of inventions including a needle threader, a power cycle, a potato planter and a power generator. He did this without a formal engineering education and very limited resources. Almost everything he made was put together out of junk – old farm machinery, bits of wire, tin and metal tubing.
One difficulty with Richard Pearse’s work was that, unlike the Wright brothers, he did not keep records of his planning and building process or of his attempts at flight. His patent applications are the only written record of his work.
His achievements have been lost sight of in the debate over whether he flew before the Wright brothers carried out their witnessed and officially recorded flight.
He worked on his own, in secret, and avoided publicity, so that nothing was known of his work outside a very small group of locals who observed some of his attempts at flying. Unfortunately, despite the ingenuity of the design of his first plane, Pearse’s work remained unknown and had no impact on the development of powered flight.
However it can be stated that Richard Pearse was the first British subject to make a powered take-off in a heavier-than-air machine which he had designed and built himself.