New Zealand farmer and inventor who performed pioneering experiments in aviation.
Background
Richard William Pearse is the fourth of nine children of Sarah Ann Brown and her husband, Digory Sargent Pearse, a farmer. Their property, Trewarlet, was 5½ miles inland from Temuka. They were a cultured family with their own orchestra; Richard played the cello.
Richard Pearse died in obscurity. His secretive and solitary manner of working resulted in his genius being unrecognised in his own lifetime, and he had no influence whatever upon the course of aviation history. Unfortunately, his posthumous reputation as a visionary inventor has been clouded by a fruitless controversy as to whether or not he flew before the Wright brothers' fully attested flights. Pearse should be remembered as an inventor of extraordinary imagination and foresight whose vision far outreached the capacity of his simple workshop technology. He was nevertheless by a wide margin (whether in 1902, 1903 or 1904) the first British subject to achieve a powered take-off in a heavier-than-air machine of his own design and construction.
Embittered and disillusioned by the lack of interest from aviation companies, Pearse became increasingly paranoid and was admitted in June 1951 to Sunnyside Mental Hospital. There he died on 29 July 1953 following a heart attack. He had never married.
Education
By disposition quiet, introspective, gentle and somewhat aloof, Pearse was a dreamer even at school. After finishing his primary education at Waitohi in 1893 he wanted to study engineering at Canterbury College, but the family could not afford it. Instead, when he turned 21, Pearse was given the use of a nearby 100-acre farm block.
Career
After considerable taxiing on his farm paddocks Pearse made his first public flight attempt down Main Waitohi Road adjacent to his farm. After a short distance aloft, perhaps 50 yards, he crashed on top of his own gorse fence. No details were recorded, by Pearse or onlookers, of this tentative flight. In two letters, published in 1915 and 1928, the inventor writes of February or March 1904 as the time when he set out to solve the problem of 'aerial navigation'. He also states that he did not achieve proper flight and did not beat the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright who flew on 17 December 1903. However, a great deal of eyewitness testimony, able to be dated circumstantially, suggests that 31 March 1903 was the likely date of this first flight attempt. (The year 1902 also has its advocates.) Pearse continued his flying experiments, achieving several further powered take-offs or long hops, most of them witnessed. None of them, in terms of length or control, was a true flight by any strict definition. In July 1906 he patented his aircraft.
Whether or not Pearse flew in any acceptable sense, and regardless of the exact date, his first aircraft was a remarkable invention embodying several far-sighted concepts: a monoplane configuration, wing flaps and rear elevator, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and a propeller with variable-pitch blades driven by a unique double-acting horizontally opposed petrol engine.
A failure as a farmer and treated with considerable scepticism by most neighbours (Cranky Dick, Mad Pearse and Bamboo Dick were three of his nicknames), Richard Pearse shifted in 1911 to South Otago where he farmed at Loudens Gully near Milton. There he devised various pieces of ingenious farm equipment before being conscripted into the Otago Infantry Regiment in May 1917. Although he was sent overseas in January 1918, illness prevented Pearse from seeing any action and he returned to New Zealand in October that year.
In 1921 he moved to Christchurch where he built three houses. In the garage workshop of one in Woolston, Pearse in the early 1930s set about designing and building a second aircraft, his Utility Plane. He applied for a patent in November 1943 and it was finally approved in 1949. Constructed in great secrecy, Pearse's convertiplane anticipated the main feature of the Harrier jump jet and other similar aircraft with a tilting engine to allow for vertical take-off and landing. Pearse hoped this extraordinary aircraft would become aviation's Model T Ford, 'the private plane for the million', able to be flown from one's backyard.