Richard Pearse - Legacy

Legacy

At the dawn of the 20th century, a number of enthusiasts in several countries advanced towards powered heavier-than-air flight — a fact easily overlooked in the wake of the first practical controlled flights by the Wright brothers, who gained international fame during their public flight demonstrations of 1908. Pearse, as one of several pre-Wright designers, advanced some distance towards controlled flight. However, unlike many of these other pre-Wright aeronauts, Pearse had little influence on his successors, because details of his ideas and experiments went unpublished.

Pearse's designs and achievements remained virtually unknown beyond the few who witnessed them, and they had no impact on his contemporary aviation designers. However, his concepts had much in common with modern aircraft design, and others later implemented these concepts without knowing of Pearse's efforts. As a result some have described Pearse as a man ahead of his time. (So far ahead of his time, in fact, that the second New Zealand flight did not occur until 5 February 1910 when Vivian Walsh flew an aircraft he had built himself.)

Many New Zealanders have made up their minds that Temuka was the site of the world's first powered flight. Wanaka has a line of tiles mounted on the sidewalk by the lake listing important world and New Zealand historic events. The 1903 tile says that the first powered flight in history occurred in Timaru (with some emphasis), and at the bottom of the tile for 1903 the Wright Brothers were listed as having also flown that year. However, Pearse himself stated in a 1915 newspaper, "Pre-eminence will undoubtedly be given to the Wright brothers of America when the history of the aeroplane is written, as they were the first to actually make successful flights with a motor-driven aeroplane."