Richard Pearse

Richard William Pearse (born December 3, 1877 in Temuka , † July 29, 1953 in Riccarton, now part of Christchurch ) was a New Zealand farmer , inventor and aviation pioneer . On March 31, 1903, almost nine months before the Wright brothers , he succeeded in flying a flying machine based on the “heavier than air” principle. However, this flight did not last very long and, above all, was not controlled.

Richard Pearse

Life

Richard Pearse was the fourth of nine children of farmer Digory Sargent Pearse and his wife Sarah Anne Pearse, nee Brown. His father was an immigrant from Cornwall and his mother was from Ireland . They met in a shop in Timaru where Sarah Pearse worked. They cultivated a large area, called Trewarlet, about eight kilometers inland from Temuka in the Waitohi Plain , where Richard was also born on December 3, 1877. The parents led an active social and cultural life. Among other things, they built a tennis court on their property. The whole family was considered very musical and formed their own music orchestra, in which Pearse played the cello .

Richard Pearse attended elementary school on the upper Waitohi level and was considered introverted, calm and meek, but also a little outsider and daydreamer. Only in the technology education he stood out and showed early interest in mechanical experiments and on the fly . There are reports that he was reading books on flying and related fields of knowledge at that time. He is said to have neglected his other homework for this. After leaving school, he wanted to study engineering at Canterbury College , but his parents were already helping his older brother Tom to study medicine and couldn't afford to finance Richard's studies. Instead, on his 21st birthday in 1898, he received a 400,000 m² piece of land near Waitohi and farmed it for the next 13 years with a few interruptions. He was still interested in various inventions and flying.

His property was secluded and protected from prying eyes by a large, supposedly three and a half meters high and almost seven meters wide gorse hedge . Pearse turned his farmhouse into a workshop and worked late into the night. He focused entirely on his inventions and stuck to this lifestyle until his end. It was in this workshop that he invented several devices, but his main fascination was flying. He soon began to design an airplane and in 1902 he started flight tests. On March 31, 1903, he took off from the ground in his plane. Pearse himself never considered this a flight. The news of the Wright brothers' flight was, according to his younger brother Warne, a "bad awakening" for Richard Pearse. There are reports, however, that he later corresponded with the Wright brothers . Despite this shock, he continued his flight experiments and in 1906 applied for a patent for his aircraft. However, his neighbors were not very happy about the experiments. The noise worried them and their cattle, and some even thought that flying was the work of the devil. Pearse responded by keeping himself and his experiments more and more away from the public.

For financial reasons, however, the focus of his work shifted more and more to theoretical considerations. At the end of 1910 he fell ill with typhus and sold his farm. He bought a new, remote farm in Loudens Gorge near Milton . The hilly terrain there was not particularly suitable for flight tests, but this did not increase its inclination for agriculture. Instead he shifted his work to agricultural inventions and motorized bicycles, for which he was soon well known in Milton. In May 1917, he was appointed Otago - Regiment moved in and in January 1918 sent overseas . However, due to illness, he was never involved in combat operations and returned to New Zealand in October of the same year.

In 1921 he got tired of country life and the sharp drop in wool prices and moved to Christchurch. There he built three houses, lived in the one in the Wolston neighborhood, and rented out the other two. The rental income served as a livelihood, so he could devote himself entirely to his inventions. He converted the garage of his house into a workshop and from 1928 planned another aircraft. From this time it is also reported that he became increasingly withdrawn and shy of the public. He received the patent for this aircraft in 1949. At that time, his inventions were already technically obsolete, the helicopter and the jet engine had already been invented. Pearse was disappointed with the aviation industry's lack of interest . His contemporaries already regarded him as a grumpy and taciturn person, but at that time a paranoia developed in which he was afraid of his inventions being betrayed by foreign spies . In June 1951 he was admitted to the Sunnyside Mental Hospital (a psychiatry in Riccarton, which was not yet part of Christchurch). He died there unmarried on July 29, 1953 of a heart attack at the age of 75 and was cremated two days later in Bromley, a suburb of Christchurch .

Inventions

Planes

Richard Pearse's first flying machine was made during his school days and consisted of a spool of thread, a board with a nail, a piece of rope and a propeller formed from the lid of a peg box . He wound the rope around the spool and pulled on it, shooting the propeller into the air. To entertain his classmates, he probably unconsciously copied the oldest depicted flying machine from a Flemish manuscript from the 13th century.

Pearse began designing his first airplane, probably in 1899. His first problem was that he needed a suitable internal combustion engine. He couldn't buy a finished engine, so with the help of Cecil Woods, an engineer in Timaru who had built the first internal combustion engine in New Zealand, he began tinkering with spark plugs and carburettors himself and had the heavy parts such as cylinders and crankshafts from Parr & Sons in Timaru. He used cigarette boxes and cast iron sewer pipes as material. He had the idea of ​​timing the spark plugs and published this idea in Scientific American magazine in 1909 . Pearse's basic idea was to use the engines from the automotive industry for aircraft. He completed the engine in 1902 and then began to design the actual aircraft. In the first flight attempts in the same year, the engine soon proved to be too weak, and so he improved it. The finished engine was a Otto - two-cycle engine with a 24  horsepower , two open cylinders on both sides, each with two piston and a weight of 57 kg. He used bamboo (the frequent use of this material earned him the nickname Bamboo Dick ) and aluminum as the material for the frame of his airplane . The chassis was a tubular steel tricycle with a nose wheel and two main wheels. The plane was a high- wing aircraft with a wingspan of about seven and a half meters. The wings were covered with canvas and connected at the ends to the chassis by wires. Overall, the construction was quite stable. The aircraft had ailerons and elevators . The engine was above in front of the pilot and was equipped with an eight-bladed propeller (the propeller was therefore in front of the wings). Also noteworthy was the poseable seat designed to survive an impact at up to 100  miles per hour . In appearance, Pearse's first aircraft was very similar to the early aerodynamically controlled microlight aircraft . On March 31, 1903, he rolled his plane down the main street of Waitohi and parked it at the intersection in front of the school. He made several attempts in front of a few roommates to start the engine. In the late afternoon the machine finally started. Richard Pearse drove off, took off his plane from the ground, climbed slowly to a height of about three meters, lost control in the process, swerved to the left and fell on his own hedge after 100 to 150 meters.

In the following years, Pearse continuously improved his aircraft and made further attempts to fly, including public ones, but all of them were crowned with the same success as his first flight. He applied for a patent for this aircraft in 1906 , which was also granted to him on August 8, 1907 under number 21476. In the same year he began with the construction of a second aircraft, which should have a wingspan of over twelve meters. It soon turned out to be not controllable, and in 1909 he probably finished work on this project without the aircraft ever being used.

In 1928 he began planning his third aircraft, the Utility Plane . It should be able to take off vertically, which is why the inclination of the drive was freely adjustable (comparable to the Harrier fighter jet ). His dream was "a Ford Model T of aviation" - an airplane for the masses that could be started from any back garden and housed in a garage. In November 1943, he applied for a patent for this new aircraft, which was finally granted to him in 1949 after long disputes. But this model has never flown.

Other inventions

Between 1910 and 1928 Richard Pearse did not seem to be concerned with flying machines. At this time in particular, other inventions became the focus of his interest. Here, too, his work began during his school days. He built a mechanical needle threader for his mother, a zoetrope or a small steam engine for his sister . The first product of his workshop in Waitohi was a bamboo bicycle with a vertical pedal drive, a bar gear and a coaster rim brake , for which he received a patent in 1902. During the time he was making aircraft, he also built other devices such as two music recorders and players, one of which was designed like a gramophone . Perhaps he wanted to capture his family's music making. When he moved to the Loudens Gorge, he built such diverse devices as a motorized plow, a fertilizer distributor and an automatic potato planter. But he was best known in Milton for his power cycle - a bicycle that he had equipped with a motor made from the cylinders of his aircraft engine.

effect

Reactions to the first flight

Pearse's first public flight in Waitohi only took place in front of a small audience and is actually not documented. Apparently he did not attach great importance to the event itself. There were neither press reports nor photographs of this event. A hospital record that may have documented Pearse's injuries from the crash was destroyed in a fire. There are some pictures on which Pearse machine can be seen in flight; but its exact date is unclear. A picture of the airplane on the hedge captured by a professional photographer was lost during a flood. Pearse Flug caused quite a stir on the Waitohi Plain and the news spread there, but there is no written record of it. So one has to rely on the reports of eyewitnesses. It is therefore not surprising that even the exact date of this flight is not certain. Although March 31, 1903 is the most frequently mentioned date, there are also witnesses who adamantly claim that the flight took place exactly one year earlier. Pearse himself has made various and ambiguous statements in which he mentions, among other things, the year 1904 (presumably the date on which he made controlled flights for the first time). C. Geoffrey Rodliffe has compiled and compared all of these statements. According to his account, it is considered certain that Pearse undertook at least one, if not necessarily the first, public flight on March 31, 1903. The residents of the Waitohi Plain reacted in disbelief to this flight, which is understandable in an area where there were no automobiles at that time . Some people also called his invention insane or heretical .

In 1909 two local newspapers, the Temuka Leader and the Otago Witness, reported an imminent flight. Probably these reports already related to his second aircraft. In addition, more than 70 motorized flights had already been carried out worldwide at that time. Later, Pearse wrote letters to newspapers in which he reported on his first flight. His later inventions, including the utility plane , no longer triggered any major reactions.

Effects on aviation development

Richard Pearse's developments had no influence on the later development of aircraft. There were probably various reasons for this. On the one hand, unlike the Wrights, Pearse did not try to document his flights. Even well-documented flights like those of the Wright brothers were heavily questioned at first. In addition, nothing was published about his flight by other people either, and so this first flight remained unknown outside New Zealand, even outside the Waitohi Plain, for a long time. The remote location of both New Zealand and the Waitohi Plain will have contributed to the rest. Finally, there is also the fact that Pearse never got beyond small "hops" and he did not have the means to advance his development even further. Many of Pearse's discoveries, such as the aileron , were later redeveloped by other aeronautical engineers.

Pearse's rediscovery

Most of his records were destroyed after his death. His house was given to a trustee who fortunately recognized the importance of Pearse developments and tried to introduce them to a wider public. Pearse's work had never been well known and was in danger of being forgotten. It wasn't until the New Zealand aviation pioneer and former chief engineer at Tasman Empire Airways , George Bolt, became aware of Pearse that this changed. He discovered the Utility Plane and some drafts in Pearse's house in Christchurch and gave it to the Auckland Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT), where it is still on display today. In 1958, research into the remaining aircraft began. Isolated parts were then found by Bolt on a rubble dump in the Waitohi plain. Soon after, his second plane was also found by Joseph Coll, a resident of the Waitohi Plains. After Bolt's discoveries, several people dealt with the life and work of Richard Pearse, above all Gordon Ogilvie and the aforementioned C. Geoffrey Rodliffe. In the mid-1970s, a replica of Pearse's first machine was made, which can also be seen in the MOTAT to this day. For lack of other historical documents, this model was also in 1974 with the assistance of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation twisted documentary uses. In one scene the aircraft was supposed to be pulled into position by a horse and then a start simulated. Unfortunately, the horse and the plane galloped away. To everyone's surprise, the plane took off and remained surprisingly stable before crashing to the ground. Although four cameramen and five or six amateur filmmakers were present on this flight , none of them had the presence of mind to point their camera at the flying plane, so that this flight is also not documented by pictures. Wind tunnel tests at the University of Auckland in 1980 confirmed that the replica was capable of flying. The documentary soon made Richard Pearse popular in New Zealand, and the myth developed there, but also elsewhere to this day, that Pearse and not the Wright brothers were the first people to take a motorized flight. In fact, the first three flights by the Wright brothers on the morning of December 17, 1903 were nothing more than small jumps, only the fourth flight lasted twelve seconds and covered a distance of almost 260 meters. It ended as abruptly as Pearse's flight, but less painfully in a sand dune than in a thorny hedge. Like Pearse, they did not carry out any controlled flights before 1904, but they did make greater progress. On the other hand, other people such as Otto Lilienthal (even without a motor), Clément Ader , Wilhelm Kress or Gustav Weißkopf had lifted off the ground with devices 'heavier than air'.

While the first powered flight today is generally attributed to the Wright brothers - not least because they invented modern airplanes - Richard Pearse is considered a technical genius whose achievements were ahead of his time and whose importance remained unrecognized throughout his life. The fact that Pearse came from a simple background, did not enjoy secondary schooling, lived in a rural environment, had little financial means and therefore often resorted to simple materials is often particularly appreciated. While the Wright brothers had a team of engineers at their side, Pearse built his aircraft in one-man operation. Its only scientific source was American Scientist magazine . Even so, his aircraft had technical features - such as the ailerons - that are still present on modern aircraft but were not found in the Wright brothers or other early aircraft builders (the Wrights used adjustable wings instead of ailerons). In this appreciation, however, one should not overlook the fact that this first aircraft was still missing some features of modern aircraft and it also had defects. For example, the ailerons were not very effective and the surfaces had no profile . Pearse's other inventions also testified to his technical talent and visionary ideas that were only put into practice years later.

Posthumous honor

In May 1982, Timaru Airport was renamed Richard Pearse Airport in his honor .

Trivia

The myth that Richard Pearse was the first motorized pilot still lingers in New Zealand today. Peter Jackson's and Costa Botes as a parody of this myth intended pseudo-documentation Forgotten Silver made a significant contribution.

literature

• C. Geoffrey Rodliffe: Wings over Waitohi: The story of Richard Pearse. 2nd Edition. Avon Books, Auckland 1993, ISBN 0-473-05000-5 (English)
• Gordon Ogilvie: The riddle of Richard Pearse. A. H. & A. W. Reed, Wellington 1973, ISBN 0-589-00794-7 (English)

Web links

• Richard William Pearse, 1877-1953 . Christchurch City Libraries,accessed September 1, 2016. 
• Richard Pearse . Auckland International Airport Limited, archived from the original onAugust 20, 2007; accessed on September 8, 2014(English, original website no longer available). 

Individual evidence

1. ^ Richard William Pearse, 1877-1953 . Christchurch City Libraries , accessed September 1, 2016 .