Richard Pearse - man of many inventions

By GORDON OGILVIE*

Sometimes I have to feel just plain sorry for Richard Pearse.

Reserved, shy, modest and towards the end of his life almost pathologically reclusive, he would have recoiled from the hullabaloo his name has recently generated.

The notion that Pearse flew before the Wright Brothers has for years created acrimony and been a distraction from more important issues concerning this far-sighted pioneer inventor.

Pearse himselfnte Pearse himself freely credited the Wright Brothers with being the first to fly, on Thursday, December 17, 1903.

His efforts are more properly described as powered take-offs, tentative flights, long-hops, lift-offs or flight attempts. Not flying.

What is there left to celebrate? Well, plenty, actually.

Pearse was very likely the third in the world to leave the ground in a powered heavier-than-air machine.

I say "very likely" because there is argument about when Pearse actually achieved that first datable tentative flight.

Of the 37 surviving witnesses who between 1958 and 1975 declared on oath that they saw Pearse experimenting with his Waitohi monoplane, several believed Pearse was trying to fly in 1903 and their evidence can be dated circumstantially.

But I'd abandon any competition with the Wright Brothers.

A much more sustainable claim to fame for Pearse lies in other contexts. He was the first in the British Empire (even if you use 1904 for your date) to achieve a powered take-off in a heavier-than-air machine.

Then there are those clever and individual petrol engines he designed and built himself.

Marvel at his 1906 aircraft patent, much closer to a modern monoplane than anything else being worked on by his contemporaries.

His second aircraft, the Utility Plane, exhibited at Auckland's Motat, embodies many novel ideas such as its "tilting engine".

Then there was his bamboo bicycle, patented in 1902, a home-built motorbike, lathe, forge, recording machine, magic viewer, harp, power generator, potato planter, topdresser, motorised disc harrows, two music boxes and a novel "sparking plug".

But largely through a geographic accident, Pearse played no part in the development of aeroplane technology and remains a forlorn footnote to aviation history.


* Gordon Ogilvie wrote The Riddle of Richard Pearse, the fourth edition of which was released this week.

- NZPA