Richard Pearse - Claims

Claims

On his death, the Public Trustee administered Pearse's estate. Fortunately for posterity, the trust officer given the task of disposing of his personal effects recognised the significance of his aeronautical achievements and brought them to wider attention. As a result, aviation pioneer George Bolt saw Pearse's last flying machine. In 1958, Bolt excavated the South Canterbury dump site and discovered some components, including a propeller. His research in the 1960s (among eyewitnesses, most of them schoolchildren at the time of Pearse's early achievements) produced strong evidence for flight in 1903: people who had left the district by 1904 remembered the events, and recalled a particularly harsh winter with heavy snow.

During filming of a television documentary in the 1970s, crew attached a replica of Pearse's 1902 machine by a rope to a team of horses. When the horses bolted, the machine took to the air and flew, indicating that the design could fly. Unfortunately, this did not get filmed, as the crew had packed away their cameras at the end of the day's shooting. Fate seems to have conspired against any of Pearse's machines achieving recognition.

In the mid 1980s, a MOTAT staff-member expressed the opinion that Pearse himself, having seen that "history had already been written" stated in his later years that though he had in fact flown in March 1903, he had said "1904" because the Wright brothers at Kittyhawk had become part of history, and that therefore Pearse declined to appear to posterity as a disputatious claimant to the first controlled powered flight. Certainly the opinion expressed makes sense, though the aircraft itself, admittedly "short-coupled" in terms of control, appears to have had the ability of controlled flight. Adding some confusion to the issue, the tilt-propeller aircraft Pearse later worked on, bears a very close resemblance to the original aircraft, and the remains at MOTAT, though presented as parts of a single machine, may very well come from three separate machines:

1. the "original" March 1903 machine
2. a later version of the same with a tilt-propeller
3. the original March 1903 motor, in sadly decayed state, along with the motor mounted in the MOTAT replica, which derived from the remains of at least two motors from the Pearse farm "dump site".

Despite close examination, a definitive determination may have become impossible.

The South Canterbury Museum in Timaru includes display material relating to Pearse and to his contribution to early aviation.

In 2012, evidence emerged in the media that a newspaper clipping from 1909 may have debunked the long debated argument. In the article, Richard Pearse was quoted as having said in November of that year: "I did not attempt anything practical with the idea until, in 1904, the St Louis Exposition authorities offered a prize of 20,000 to the man who invented and flew a flying machine over a specified course. I did not, as you know, succeed in winning the prize. Neither did anybody." However, contrary to this article, Evan Gardiner, a great nephew of Richard's has countered with his own article stating that information from some sources was "taken out of context with the rest of Pearse's letter and has enabled Martyn to present his case and subsequent article on a false premise."