- MARK COLVIN: Today is the 100th anniversary of the Wright
brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk, but over the Tasman, there are some who
dispute Wilbur and Orville's claim to have been the first into the air.
-
- In New Zealand in March 1903, an inventor named Richard
Pearse got airborne in a remote part of the country. He flew 140 metres
before crashing into a gorse-bush. So has Richard Pearse been unjustly
forgotten by history? Or are the Kiwis being cheeky trying to claim a world
first?
-
- New Zealand Correspondent Gillian Bradford.
-
- GILLIAN BRADFORD: In 1903, New Zealand's south island
was a just a far-flung dot of the British Empire. There was just one motor
vehicle on the entire island and not much went on but farming.
-
- So when inventor Richard Pearse took to the air in a
homemade bamboo monoplane, his own family and neighbours thought it so
strange it took years for the event to get any attention.
-
- Historian Gordon Ogilvy.
-
- GORDON OGILVY: He was considered an odd ball. He was
nicknamed Mad Pearce or Bamboo Dick down in south Canterbury and nobody
took him seriously because he wasn't a particularly good farmer.
-
- GILLIAN BRADFORD: What Richard Pearse did is get his
flying machine in the air. But other than that, details are sketchy. No
one in New Zealand actually looked at his achievement until the late 1950s.
By then there were just a handful of eyewitnesses, leaving historian Gordon
Ogilvy with the difficult task of piecing together what actually happened
and when.
-
- GORDON OGILVY: There's no doubt whatever that Pearse
was airborne, even in his own written descriptions of what his experiments
are like ñ that is clear. And after a short period which might have
been 50 yards to 100 yards to 150, nobody is sure now, he veered to the
left and crashed onto the top of one of his own gorse hedges, which is
about 12 feet high. Without doubt he was airborne, but not in controlled
flight.
-
- GILLIAN BRADFORD: So did Richard Pearse actually fly
before the Wright brothers?
-
- According to former RAF engineer and Pearse biographer
Geoff Rodliffe there's no point getting bogged down in semantics over what
flying means ñ plain and simple, Pearse flew.
-
- GEOFF RODLIFFE: The dates would suggest that, the dates
which have been established.
-
- GILLIAN BRADFORD: What type of flight was it? This is
what the argument comes down to. Was it sustained enough, was he in the
air for long enough, was it a controlled flight?
-
- GEOFF RODLIFFE: To an extent, controlled. There's quite
a similarity to the Wrights' straight flight because theirs was just straight
flights on a rail down towards the sea and he was only attempting a straight
lift off and landing again, completely under its own power, and on wheels,
of course.
-
- GILLIAN BRADFORD: Pearse himself never claimed to be
the first to fly but what he did was still a remarkable achievement that's
been overlooked in aviation history.
-
- Historian Gordon Ogilvy.
-
- GORDON OGILVY: I would say he was the first to achieve
a powered take off or tentative flights, not through flights, tentative
flights, in New Zealand, in Australasia, in the southern hemisphere and
until James McCurdy in Canada flew in 1909, I think it was, nobody in the
British Empire flew at all.
-
- He went right from the horse and gig economy into aviation,
he bypassed the motor car altogether ñ Pearse never had a car in
his life ñ and this is the extraordinary thing, when people were
struggling to understand what a motorcar was all about to have this strange
farmer trying to build a flying machine.
-
- GILLIAN BRADFORD: The sad ending to the Richard Pearse
story ñ after being so ridiculed by neighbours for his flying attempts
Pearse became a recluse. He toiled away at other inventions in an old farmhouse
and died in a Christchurch mental hospital aged 75.
-
- This is Gillian Bradford in Auckland for PM.
-
- http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2003/s1012226.htm
|
