THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512140127
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 252 lines
THE STORY of Richard Pearse begins near the end, in 1951.
He was an old man by then, long-haired and rawboned and mussed, a recluse who ate, slept and passed his days in one room of his home-built cottage, and he was coming apart.
He threatened strangers, accused them of spying, of trying to steal his secrets. He stumbled around his yard in stockinged feet, shouting at unseen enemies. Doctors took him away.
Not long after, a property inspector visited the cottage to catalog Pearse's belongings. He found little - an old cello, a gas stove, a bicycle lamp. Then he opened the garage.
Inside were the ruins of a flying machine.
It was the last of several he had built. Overlooked in history's rush, Richard Pearse - now ruined himself and destined to die in a mental hospital - had been an air pioneer at the century's turn.
As a young man he had crafted a more primitive machine from bamboo, calico and iron pipe. In it, he had taken off from a rutted dirt road in Waitohi, New Zealand, and sailed 50 or more yards through the air.
And if Waitohi's old-timers could be believed, this farmer and backyard tinkerer had done it eight months before Wilbur and Orville Wright lifted off from the dunes at Kill Devil Hills, 92 years ago today.
It was this earlier plane, villagers said, that Pearse had wheeled out of a canvas-covered shed on a Tuesday afternoon decades before, and pushed a half-mile down the Waitohi Road.
Around him stretched a quiltwork of small farms, the homesteads of Irish immigrants scraping by on barley, mutton and moonshine. Two dozen of them gathered as Pearse stopped at a crossroads, turned his machine around, and climbed into the cockpit.
He sat suspended beneath a vast wing of fabric stretched tight over bamboo struts. His younger brother, Warne, spun the machine's propeller, struggling to start an engine that Pearse had built entirely by hand, down to the bolts.
After several false starts, the spectators' curiosity waned. Most wandered off.
Late in the afternoon, Warne pulled the prop a final time. The unmuffled engine roared and clattered, the propeller's blast snatching Warne's hat. With Pearse in its skeletal cockpit, the plane began to roll.
Down the Waitohi Road it taxied. Long seconds passed. Then Pearse goosed the engine, and as his little audience watched wide-eyed from the crossroads, as others gaped from behind their plows and atop haystacks in nearby fields, Richard Pearse and his flying machine lurched into the air.
Pitching and wobbling, the plane crawled skyward at about 20 mph, then veered sharply to the left. Pearse's adventure ended with minor injuries, and with his machine tangled atop a 10-foot gorse hedge.
Half a world away, the Wright brothers were perfecting their primitive biplane in Dayton, Ohio. Samuel Pierpont Langley, another American, was racing to complete his Aerodrome. Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian, was chasing manned flight too, along with a squadron of Frenchmen.
All were celebrated in their lifetimes. Most are well-remembered today.
Not Richard Pearse.
When he died in 1953, at age 75, he was unknown in his own small country, an awkward bachelor with few relatives and fewer friends. A handful of people attended his funeral.
Yet of flight's pioneers, perhaps none accomplished so much with so little.
The machine in which he took off that day - most likely, March 31, 1903 - was far more modern than his contemporaries'.
At a time when most would-be aircraft were catapulted into flight or, like the Wright Flyer, took off from a rail, Pearse's plane sat atop three air-filled tires, a design that remains the standard today.
While the Wrights warped the wings of their craft to steer and steady it, Pearse used an early form of wingtip ailerons, or steering flaps - also today's standard.
The Wrights lay prone on the lower wing of their Flyer. Pearse sat upright, on a sliding seat he hoped would absorb the impact of a crash and enable him to adjust the plane's balance.
And he built this remarkable machine not with factory backing or the support of benefactors but alone, with the scraps found on a frontier - food tins, fencing wire and, in the case of his engine's cylinders, irrigation pipe.
``When you see where he came from, it makes his accomplishment all the more remarkable,'' said Gordon Ogilvie, a New Zealand writer who has spent 30 years reconstructing Pearse's life.
``In Waitohi there weren't even any motorcars. He went straight from horse and carriage to airplane, skipping the steps in between.''
No photographs survive of the flight or of the wrecked plane. No newspaper published a story about it. If Pearse ever kept a record of the event, it is long gone, along with the diaries of his witnesses.
Were it not for the property inspector's chance discovery, he might remain as forgotten as he was the day he died.
But Pearse's last airplane survived. Spared from the town dump, it was hauled from his garage to a flying-club hangar in Christchurch, the largest city on New Zealand's South Island.
There, in 1956, a visiting aviator named George Bolt spied the pile of rusting scrap metal and wire. His inquiries about its inventor took him to Waitohi.
He found the area much changed from the sod-hut hamlet in which Pearse was born in 1877. Its 50 small farms had consolidated into a few large ones, and its gathering places - a church, library, pub, two schools and a tennis club - had vanished.
Pieces of the past remained, however, in a corps of elderly farmers. They recalled Pearse as a quiet boy who made no memorable mark in school. A taciturn adult. A loner who never found romance. A bit of a crank. An awful farmer who neglected his land, instead passing his days in his workshed.
And an airman. Twenty-one of them interviewed by Bolt or Ogilvie testified that they had seen him airborne at least once. Others had seen the plane's wreckage on the hedge. Most were doubtless that Pearse had left the ground first on March 31.
``They were dating things by the means of births, deaths, pregnancies, teachers coming and going, land transactions, when there was a storm or potato drought,'' Ogilvie said. ``When I analyzed all of these, I had four witnesses who placed it in 1902 and three in 1904. And 19 in 1903.''
Had Pearse beaten the Wrights? Did the acclaim bestowed on the Americans rightfully belong to a dirt farmer on the far side of the globe?
At first glance, it might seem so. While villagers differed on the distance Pearse covered in his few seconds aloft, the most conservative put it at 50 yards - better than the 120 feet the Wrights achieved in their first powered flight of Dec. 17, 1903.
To cap the witnesses' claims, a local farmer digging on a riverbank turned up the rotted guts of Pearse's first airplane in 1958. Ogilvie, digging further at the site in 1971, unearthed chunks of the plane's original engine, including its sluice-pipe cylinders.
But there were two catches, and one came from Pearse himself. In two letters he wrote years later, the inventor claimed he had started his aerial experiments in 1904 - which, if true, would put his take-off four months behind the Wrights.
The letters were rife with errors: among them, that the Wrights first flew in 1905. But they were enough, for many, to write off Pearse's accomplishments.
``That's always seemed rather silly to me,'' Ogilvie said. ``There were so many ifs and buts with those letters.
``If he kept no log or diaries or photos or records, then he was relying on his memory just as everyone else was. But many chose to side with his recollection, rather than the memory of so many others.''
Another problem was thornier. Contrary to widespread belief, the Wrights are not credited with making the first flight, but with the first sustained, controlled flight in a heavier-than-air craft.
And on one point all the Waitohi witnesses agreed.
Pearse crashed.
Word of the Wrights' first flights broke on Dec. 18, 1903, on the front page of The Virginian-Pilot.
The news did not reach New Zealand until months, perhaps years, later. If Pearse was bothered by their achievement, he did not show it. He continued his aerial experiments, fitting four increasingly sophisticated engines in his craft and surviving numerous crashes.
He probably built a second machine, and took out a patent in 1906. But secretive even as a young man, Pearse shunned publicity. When the first edition of Jane's All the World's Airships appeared in 1909, he went unmentioned.
The Wrights were famous and well on their way to wealth by then. Pearse, meanwhile, ``was living below the bread line, because he was so unsuccessful as a farmer,'' Ogilvie said. ``I mean, he didn't even try. He put all of his time into inventions that everyone thought was crazy. He had things rattling 'round in his head.''
When he gave up aviation shortly before World War I, nobody noticed.
Nor did he get, or seek, attention when he returned to flight in the 1920s. While Americans enshrined the Wrights with a 60-foot granite monument at Kill Devil Hills, Pearse worked alone in his Christchurch garage, living on potatoes and hog's heads, designing an ``airplane for the million.''
It was a propeller-driven machine with a tiltable engine designed to take off and land almost vertically - an idea years ahead of its time, and the principle behind such modern aircraft as the Navy's V-22 Osprey.
But it took Pearse two decades to think it through, and five years to draw up patent papers. It was 1949 when he finally offered his design to aircraft builders.
They were not impressed. ``After the war helicopters had taken over, and they were into jet propulsion then,'' Ogilvie explained. ``He'd been 30 years dreaming of this aircraft, 20 years building it and patenting it. And it came to naught.
``At that stage, he had a sort of crackup. He stopped eating. He was a very gentle man, but he started threatening people, shouting, and the neighbors called the police.''
Pearse wound up at the Sunnyside Hospital, an asylum in Christchurch. His airplane for the million gathered dust in his garage, awaiting discovery.
What is remarkable about him,'' Ogilvie said earlier this month, ``is really not what he achieved - because in the end, he achieved nothing.''
Pearse's first plane, brilliantly conceived, did not conquer the air. His last one, while farsighted, influenced no one.
His legacy is, rather, that his failures were wonderfully clever. ``If only he had a workshop or a university grant behind him,'' Ogilvie said, ``he might have produced patents that could very well have changed the face of flight.
``But he was just a genius with a primary school education, working in a vacuum. No one knew what he was doing, the poor beggar. None of his ideas were taken up.''
He recorded a few firsts - first Briton in the air, builder of the first propeller-pulled monoplane, perhaps even builder of the first gasoline engine designed for flight.
But mostly he is remembered, by those who remember him at all, as an also-ran. That his may have been the most successful attempt to fly before the Wrights is usually overlooked.
Pearse summed up his own aeronautical work in a 1915 letter to a newspaper editor.
``As Wrights' patent was not published at the time I took out mine, it cannot be said that I copied,'' he wrote of his first plane. ``. . . it amounts to this: that it is a case of two persons living on opposite sides of the world arriving at the same conclusion; and, this being so, I can justly claim to having discovered it independently.
``If I have claimed anything unduly, I want to know it.''
A half-million tourists a year visit the Wright Brothers National Memorial, where atop a windblown, 90-foot dune soars America's monument to a feat ``conceived by genius, achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.''
A nearby museum preserves the brothers' lives and inventions. Outside, visitors can eye replicas of the Wrights' rough wooden hut and hangar, and tread the ground covered in their first flights.
No such grandeur waits 11,000 miles away. Far from the nearest highway, on the shoulder of the lonesome Waitohi Road, a simple, quarter-scale model of Pearse's monoplane turns in the wind atop a steel pylon.
Behind it, shaded by a chain of limestone terraces, their bones laid bare in bluffs and outcrops, is the paddock where he built the machine.
It is also where, in 1975, a New Zealand television company filmed a documentary on Pearse's life, using a replica of his plane drawn from his 1906 patent.
A horse was dragging the machine into position when the animal bolted.
The plane immediately lifted off the ground.
No one thought to take a picture of it. ILLUSTRATION: Photos courtesy Gordon Ogilvie
Richard Pearse in 1903
Researchers used Pearse's 1906 patent to produce this replica of his
first monoplane, which closely resembled a modern ultralight. The
reproduction accidentally took flight in 1975.
Gordon Ogilvie, far left, and Waitohi residents dig for airplane
parts in 1971, an effort that yielded the first Pearse monoplane's
engine cylinders. The home-made powerplant's design - with two,
horizontally opposed cylinders fashioned from irrigation pipe -
presaged Volkswagen engines of decades later.
Richard Pearse in the New Zealand Army, 1917: This photo, taken 36
years before his death, is the last known of him.
Evan Gardiner, Pearse's great-nephew, soars over the Richard Pearse
Memorial in Waitohi in a strikingly similar modern ultralight.
Graphic
Photos
TIMELINE
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: AIRPLANES INVENTORS by CNB