|
pearse 90 |
|
pearse 200 |
|
By many measures, Richard Pearse's most famous attempt at powered flight was a largely unsuccessful undertaking. His home-made craft was aloft for just seconds and it carried him perhaps 100 metres (330 ft) before dumping him unceremoniously in a prickly hedge on his property near Waitohi, a small farming community in New Zealand's South Island.
Except for one disputed fact it would have been long forgotten.
Best estimates put the date of that flight at March 31, 1903 -- 100 years ago and nearly nine months before the Wright brothers made what is widely recognised as the world's first powered flight.
Few mementos of Pearse's quest for flight remain.
No one was on hand to record his flight attempts, no diary or journal detailing his obsession has survived, and few photographs remain of the man his neighbours knew as Bamboo Dick or Mad Pearse.
A picture of his flying machine after it crashed into a hedge was destroyed by a flood and hospital records of the injured shoulder Pearse sustained in a crash were destroyed in a fire.
But aviation engineer, historian and Pearse enthusiast Geoff Rodliffe said there are five convincing accounts of Pearse's flight attempts between 1902 and 1904.
Rodliffe likened Pearse's flights to those of a fat partridge that can just stagger off the ground.
"But nobody, until 1905, managed controlled flight, fully controlled flight," Rodliffe said.
REPLICAS ALOFT?
Although debate continues about whether Pearse's efforts preceded or bettered the Wright brothers, this month New Zealand is celebrating the centenary of his achievements with an air pageant near his old home town.
Replicas of Pearse's craft -- a triangular frame of iron suspended beneath cloth-covered wings made of bamboo -- will be on display and enthusiasts may attempt to get them airborne with the help of a modern microlite engine.
"We're a little bit cautious, in case it goes off like a damp squib. If we said we were going to fly it, we'd be putting our heads on the block," Rodliffe said.
"It's much like Pearse because everybody expected him to take off, turn circles and return, but of course he didn't. He just hopped off the ground and what use was that?"
Three separate teams have been working on re-creating Pearse's original engines, which will also be on display on March 29-30 at Richard Pearse Airport in Timaru, 440 km (265 miles) southwest of Wellington.
Replicas are based on parts that were found in a rubbish dump nearly 50 years ago and a few surviving drawings.
Many of Pearse's designs proved ahead of their time and his machine bears some striking resemblances to modern microlites.
BAMBOO AND TOBACCO TINS
An unenthusiastic farmer, Pearse would spend hours in his workshop building his aircraft at a time when there were just a handful of automobiles in the country.
Pearse had to recycle metal from old tobacco tins, make his own spark plugs and build cylinders for his primitive internal combustion engines from iron water pipes.
His first propellers were wooden, later ones had blades cut from metal drums. Bamboo was used extensively.
Pearse continued to develop ideas for flight for some time after news broke in December 1903 of the Wright brothers' achievements at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina.
But having failed to master controlled flight, he played down his own achievements and became more reclusive and eccentric.
Pearse spent his last days alone in a psychiatric institution and his contribution to early aviation was largely overlooked until after his death in 1953.
By good fortune, a later model aircraft designed and built by Pearse was salvaged, reviving interest in his efforts, which were eventually traced back to those early days of the 20th century in rural New Zealand.
Pearse's biographer, Gordon Ogilvie, said there was an element of Greek tragedy in Pearse.
"He was an inventive phenomenon in a small community where farming was everything. If you couldn't farm, you were an idiot. And yet he chose to do the unthinkable -- to fly."