Richard Pearse

Courtesy of NZ Today Magazine.

He's the forgotten man. Forget what established history tells you about the Wright Brothers, this lonely genius from South Canterbury was the first man in the world to fly.

History needs to be re-written. New Zealander Richard Pearse was the first person in history to fly! You can argue semantics over what is the precise definition of flight, but sometime in March 1902 on a remote South Canterbury farm on what was the edge of civilisation, Pearse got his aircraft into the air powered by an internal combustion engine of his own design. He took off along the road running near his family’s farms at Waitohi, flew about 50 metres before crashing into a tall gorse hedge. The precise date is not known because the event was not recorded in any official sense, but it was carried out in front of a small group of mainly children and research has shown, without any doubt, that this flight occurred in March 1902. The Wright Brothers flew their aircraft at Kittyhawk in the United States on December 17, 1903 in an event that was well recorded and has generally become established as the breakthrough point in man’s search for self-powered, controlled flight.

Pearce’s achievements were not really known about outside his family and the immediate Waitohi area of South Canterbury until his death in 1953 and the discovery of a partly completed aircraft behind the house where he had last lived in Christchurch. Again, just as on that day in March 1902, family and a few friends knew of the existence of this later vertical take-off aircraft, but it was unknown by the outside world. Pearse had died in Christchurch’s Sunnyside mental hospital and when it came to tidy up his affairs and clear out his house someone realised that there was something significant here. The discovery of this aircraft led to interest in this unknown, loner of a man and the subsequent revelations of his incredible achievements. It was Auckland aircraft pioneer George Bolt who started peeling away the layers of history that has resulted in what we know today about this enigmatic man from Waitohi. Initially there was total disbelief that a man working privately, alone and so far away from the rest of the world could possibly have beaten the Wright Brothers into the air and that any such feat could have remained unknown for so long.

But once the facts were established beyond dispute the “establishment’ grouped together so that the Wright Brothers and America would forever get the credit for pioneering flight. Their argument against Richard Pearse is based on the definition of “flight” and the naysayers claim that while Pearse may well have designed and built his own aircraft and got it into the air 17 or 18 months before Orville and Wilbur, he had no real control over it & witness the crash into the hedge & and thus he did not have “controlled” flight. To the disbelievers, Richard Pearse is just a curious sideshow to the main act of the Wright Brothers.

But the much talked about flight that ended in the gorse bush where there is now a memorial at Waitohi may not have been Pearce’s first flight & and it certainly was not his last. He flew his aircraft many more times & on one occasion flying up the bed of the nearby Opihi River for almost a kilometre and demonstrating real control. He crashed into the river on this occasion after the engine overheated and ran out of power. This flight not only confounds those who say he only ever crashed into a hedge, but also illustrates the confidence Pearse had in flying. On this occasion Pearse took off from a paddock, aimed at a cliff that dropped off sheer into the riverbed & a drop of 25 metres that would almost certainly have killed or badly injured him if the aircraft hadn’t flown. Witnesses say they saw the plane flying from the moment it got up enough speed and they saw Pearse turn the plane to fly up the river. Vested interests and established history are the reasons why Pearse’s achievements have never been universally accepted, but why was such a momentous event as man’s first powered flight not known about until 60 or 70 years after the event? Firstly Waitohi (pronounced Wai-tui locally) at the dawn of the 20th century was still remote and really was on the edge of civilisation. And Pearse worked by himself, for himself & as plenty of people still do. He had no PR operators working for him to ensure publicity, there was no government funding, no giant corporation backing him to reap the rewards of the success that would flow from designing and building the first aeroplane. One of the other reasons that so little of Pearse’s exploits were known outside the Waitohi area is that many of the farming families in the region were Plymouth Brethren and regarded his attempts at flight as ungodly and ignored them.

The Pearse family were well-established and highly respected farmers in the Waitohi area situated in typical rolling South Canterbury farmland, midway between Pleasant Point on what is now SH8 and Temuka on SH1. His father was Digory Sargent Pearse from Cornwall and his mother was Sarah Browne from Ireland. They came to NZ, settled at Waitoihi and had nine children. Richard was the fourth. Pearse’s parents wanted an academic life for Richard, but after sending his two older brothers to University there was no money to send Richard and so they gave him the use of about 100 acres of land so he could be a farmer. But Richard had not really wanted to be an academic, or a farmer, he wanted to be an engineer and even as a child he had shown a remarkable aptitude for mechanical things. He was in his early 20s and a reluctant farmer when he decided that there had to be an easier way of getting to Temuka for his farm supplies and food than push-biking on secondary, barely formed roads. He subscribed to a couple of leading international scientific magazines which obviously kept him abreast of the early and accelerating investigations into flight. He would have been well aware of the early and ongoing efforts by the Wright Brothers and their work with unpowered gliders.

It’s fashionable to portray Pearse as weird, eccentric, a sort of harmless mad-scientist and a crackpot. But he was a handsome, charming, if private person who participated in family and local affairs and events and played the cello which he took to all family gatherings. Pearse later moved to Milton in South Otago and appears to have given up experimenting with aircraft. He sold the Milton farm, moved to Christchurch where he used the money from the sale of his farm to build three houses, living in one and renting the other two out. It was here he designed and built his vertical take off aircraft. But he became more and more withdrawn and paranoid that someone would steal the plane and its design. He was finally admitted to Sunnyside where he was to die. But he was also a genius. His aircraft were not his only inventions. He was constantly creating machinery of all kinds. He also built a motorcycle using bamboo for the frame and he designed and built his own internal combustion engine. When it became obvious that the history of Richard Pearse needed exploring George Bolt went straight to the tip that every farmer has on his farm.

Several small parts of what’s understood to have been the first plane were found. At least two replicas of what’s understood to be Pearse’s first aircraft have been built. Pearse may have worked alone, but he did file his designs with the patent office and it’s from these drawings that both replicas have been built. The first was the work of long-time Pearse investigator and supporter, Aucklander Geoff Rodliffe and it was powered by a modern, conventional microlight engine. Attempts to fly it were thwarted by bad weather and this machine now lies in a dark and dusty corner, out of sight and out of mind at MOTAT in Auckland, to the shame of near-90 years of age Rodcliffe. The second was built in Timaru by a team of four people & two working on the aircraft and two building a replica of the original Pearse engine. Attempts to fly it have also failed because while the engine runs, it doesn’t produce sufficient power to allow the aircraft to attain lift-off speed. The aircraft sits in a hangar at Timaru airport at Levels alongside a replica of the original Wright Brothers “Flyer” and the comparisons are stark.

The Wright Brothers machine has nothing in common with today’s aircraft. It needed skids to take off from, the pilot lay prone, facing forward and control of the aircraft was by twisting the wing. And the engine was at the rear using the pusher method of propulsion. Startlingly, the Pearse machine looks like a microlight from the 1970s or 1980s. Modern aircraft are clear evolutions of this design. It has a tricycle undercarriage, the pilot sits within the centre of the machine, the engine is at the front and pulls the aircraft along and it has ailerons in the wings. Just like every modern aircraft. Only in one regard was the Wright Brothers machine better than Pearse’s AND that’s in the propeller design. Geoff Rodcliffe’s effort to get his Pearse replica airborne are thwarted by personal age, a lack of finance and indifference from the world around him. The Timaru machine suffers from similar problems and the team who built the replica, particularly the engine, are also elderly and poor health is also an issue.

What Pearse achieved is incredible. Not only did he design and build a working aircraft that is clearly the forerunner of today’s machines, he also built his own internal combustion engine. There were very, very few cars, if any, in the Waitohi area, so Pearse would have had to glean most of his understanding on designing and building the engine from the magazines he subscribed to. But he also possibly had help from another South Canterbury mechanical genius Cecil Wood. Cecil Wood designed and built the first motor car in New Zealand in 1896. It was a three wheeler and it’s almost certain that Woods gave Pearse some advice on the principles of building an internal combustion engine. Like Pearse, Cecil Woods was also a genius and he went on to great achievements in a very public life and was the president of the Motor Trade Association in 1928/29. While Pearse imported the bamboo to build the frame of his aircraft and the cloth to cover it with, the engine was built in his workshop using parts he made himself or cobbled up from odds and ends around the farm.

For instance, the cylinders are lengths of large irrigation pipe. The engine was a horizontally opposed, two cylinder device but Pearse extracted twice as much power from it as engines of comparable size by having the pistons double-sided so that they fired at both ends of the stroke AND effectively doubling the engine’s capacity. It was probably the lightest, most powerful internal combustion engine in the world at that time. But it seems that the modern interpretation of the Pearse engine doesn’t produce the same power as the original Eighty year old Jack Melhopt, who was largely responsible for the construction of the Timaru airframe would dearly love to get it aloft and “but it needs more power.” Jack suspects that it might be because the modern interpretation uses modern carburettors in place of the tobacco tin based surface carburettors that Pearse used. “If I was going to go up in the air in the plane, I didn’t want to rely on the original design carburettors.” Jack’s still mad keen on flying and holds his current pilot’s license and can be found most Sundays out at the airport in his hangar fiddling with his own modern aircraft that he flies with his wife Audrey. I spent a day with Jack and it’s not difficult to tell what his interests are. The walls of his home are covered with photographs of aircraft and shelves chock a block with models of classic cars. Apart from his plane, Jack also owns 11 cars including classic MGs and a 1914 Model T Ford that he’s converting into a “speedster”. Jack spent the morning telling me of the Pearse history and trying to get both the Rodcliffe and the Timaru replicas aloft. Then it’s out to the airport to see the replica, then off to Waitohi to look at the memorial on the spot where the “recorded” flight ended in the gorse bush. After lunch at the Timaru RSA, Jack takes me to meet Richard Warne Pearse AND a nephew of Richard William Pearse, aviator. Mr Pearse, who is nearly 90, remembers his uncle well as a slightly eccentric man who became increasingly withdrawn as he got older.

“When I came back from the war in 1944 I went to see him at his house in Christchurch and he showed me his latest plane. “It was in his garage and it was a vertical take off machine that had an engine that could move through 90 degrees and it also had folding wings and his dream was to see this sort of aircraft available for everyone.” There’s an obvious pride in the achievements of his uncle in Mr Pearse’s lovely, architecturally designed home in Timaru he’s retired to from the family farm. There are framed photographs of Richard William Pearse and in a bookshelf a collection of every book written about him, as well as a small copper model of that aircraft. But Richard Warne Pearse also has a story. And unlike many who went off to war he has recorded events in a small, self-published book. He did so for his children, their children and for posterity. He enlisted in the NZ Army early in WW Two against his father’s wishes and went overseas, first fighting in Greece and then in the desert. He was one of 800 New Zealanders who were surrounded by 56 German tanks at Al Alamein and surrendered.

They were sent by ship to Italy and a prisoner of war camp, but midway across the Mediterranean the ship was torpedoed by a British submarine and badly damaged. Mr Pearse was one of about 400 in the forward hold and he managed to scramble up onto the deck via ropes unharmed, but 300 of his companions died. The ship was towed to Greece, repairs were carried out and then they continued to Italy where he was put into a camp in the north. As his occupation was listed as “farmer” he was given a job working in the fields outside the camp and was guarded by members of the Italian army. One day the soldiers simply walked off leaving the prisoners unguarded.

“The Allies had landed in the south and Italy had capitulated and were out of the war, so the guards went home leaving us there. I joined up with two other fellows from South Canterbury and a priest gave us some help putting us in contact with a group of Italian partisans.” For nine months Mr Pearse and his mates made their way south to try and find the New Zealanders who were part if the Allied forces fighting their way up through Italy against fierce German resistance.

“We were with three partisan groups AND the first two were scattered by the Germans, but the last was quite effective and we took part in raids against German convoys and that sort of thing.”

But the Italians weren’t overwhelmingly receptive to having the three kiwis in their midst and they constantly had to ask for food and other supplies.

Finally they made their way south to a point where they met up with the Allies and were rejoined with the New Zealanders. “We were anxious to get back into fighting, but the commanders had decided we’d had enough and sent us back home where I came back to the farm.” Where do we now go with the Richard William Pearse story? Search for information on the history of flight and overwhelmingly it’s the Wright Brothers that get all of the credit. That’s disappointing enough given the time that has elapsed since Pearse’s achievements were confirmed, but the real slap in the face comes when you discover that in many references and histories there is simply no mention of Pearse at all. Richard Pearse was apparently indifferent to whether his place in history was ever recorded or not. And there are many who take the side of the apologists who say Pearse never achieved controlled flight. But that seems to be based on that single flight that ended in the gorse hedge. But Pearse may have flown before that and certainly did many times later.

In any other country, the population would have ensured that Pearse was hailed internationally. But with our tall poppy, glass is half empty psyche, we seem happy to keep a genuine hero locked in a cupboard.

Story and photography Allan Dick Courtesy of NZ TODAY. To subscribe phone 0800 611 911 or e-mail.

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