Who was really first to fly? The strange case of Richard Pearse, the South Canterbury farmer who may have beaten the Wright brothers
A deep dive into one of aviation’s most stubborn debates, and the New Zealander at the centre of it.
Every December, school textbooks around the world repeat the same line. On 17 December 1903, on a windswept stretch of dune at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two American bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright became the first humans to fly a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft. The flight lasted 12 seconds. It covered 36 metres. And it changed the world.
But for more than half a century, a quiet counter-claim has rolled out of the paddocks of South Canterbury. Some nine months before the Wrights ever left the ground at Kitty Hawk, a reclusive farmer named Richard Pearse — known to his neighbours variously as “Mad Pearse,” “Bamboo Dick,” and “Cranky Dick” — is said to have pushed a strange, bamboo-and-canvas contraption out onto the Main Waitohi Road, fired up a homemade petrol engine, and lifted himself briefly into the New Zealand sky.
So who was really first? The answer, it turns out, depends almost entirely on what you mean by the word “fly.”
The man in the paddock
Richard William Pearse was born on 3 December 1877 at Waitohi Flat, one of nine children of an Irish-born farmer and his wife. The family was, by South Canterbury standards, cultured — they had their own orchestra, and Richard played the cello. He was a quiet, introspective boy, “a dreamer even at school,” according to his biographer Gordon Ogilvie, the historian whose work forms the spine of nearly everything we now know about Pearse.
He wanted to study engineering at Canterbury College. The family couldn’t afford it. Instead, on his 21st birthday, Pearse was given the use of a 100-acre farm block near Waitohi. He promptly built a workshop, designed his own forge and lathe, and proceeded — to the bafflement and quiet contempt of his neighbours — to spend most of his time inventing things rather than farming them.
His first patent, filed in 1902, was for a bamboo-framed bicycle with a vertical pedal action, integral tyre pumps, and back-pedal rim brakes. It was the kind of thing that would have made a fortune for a man with capital and connections. Pearse had neither. What he did have was the Scientific American, a subscription that kept him in touch with what aviation experimenters overseas were attempting, and an extraordinary, almost feral ingenuity.
By 1902 he had built a two-cylinder petrol “oil engine” of his own design. By early 1903 he had bolted it onto a tricycle undercarriage, fixed a bamboo-and-canvas wing above it, and produced something that — in photographs of the surviving replicas — looks startlingly like a modern microlight.
What happened on 31 March 1903
This is where the trouble starts.
Pearse left no diary entries about his flying experiments. He took no photographs. He filed no contemporaneous newspaper account. The dating of his earliest flight attempts rests almost entirely on the memories of neighbours, schoolchildren, and farmhands, interviewed decades after the fact — many of them in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, by aviation historian George Bolt and later by Ogilvie and researcher Geoffrey Rodliffe.
What those witnesses described was this: at some point in the autumn of 1903, Pearse rolled his machine out onto the Main Waitohi Road. With his brother Warne’s help, the engine was started. The aircraft taxied along the road, lifted off, climbed to perhaps three or four metres, travelled somewhere between 50 yards and 350 yards, veered left, and crashed on top of a gorse hedge — leaving Pearse stuck up in the prickles, the engine still running, until someone could fetch him down.
The date matters enormously, and the witnesses pin it down through circumstantial cross-checks rather than calendars. One witness recalled telling friends and family the next day, only to be accused of pulling an April Fool’s prank — placing the event on 31 March. Another, Louise Johnson, watched from high ground with her sister-in-law and brother-in-law; she remembered the take-off occurring well before she moved away from Waitohi in May 1904. A third, Daisy Crawford, was certain the event happened on a Tuesday, and 31 March 1903 was a Tuesday. The flight was also dated as occurring before the so-called “Big Snow” of mid-July 1903 — the catastrophic storm that produced the coldest temperature ever recorded in New Zealand, around minus 25.6°C at Ranfurly’s Eweburn station in Otago.
Ogilvie, working through the 1970s and 80s, eventually compiled accounts from 37 former Waitohi residents, 21 of whom claimed to have personally seen Pearse fly. A later count put the named witnesses at 48, with researchers identifying as many as 55 people connected to the events in some way. Most converged, with circumstantial dating, on 31 March 1903 — eight or nine months before Kitty Hawk.
There’s a small but vocal minority who argue for 31 March 1902, which would push the gap to 21 months. There’s also a faction — pointing to a 1909 newspaper feature in which Pearse himself said he “did not attempt anything practical with the idea until 1904” — who argue the whole thing happened after the Wrights, and the witnesses simply misremembered. Ogilvie, after decades of work, settled on 1903 as the most defensible date but warned, with the careful phrasing of a historian who knows what he doesn’t have: “All the witnesses are dead. Don’t ever say ‘flights’ when talking of Pearse. Powered take-offs. Flight attempts. Tentative flights.”
The machine itself
Whatever you decide about the date, the aircraft is remarkable.
Pearse’s monoplane was, in almost every important respect, more modern than the Wright Flyer. Where the Wrights flew a biplane with skids, launched from a rail, controlled by warping the entire wing, Pearse built a monoplane with a tricycle undercarriage and a steerable nosewheel — meaning it could take off from any flat road under its own power, with no ramps, no rails, and no catapult. Where the Wrights warped their wings, Pearse used hinged flaps on the trailing edge of the wing — what we now call ailerons — and patented them a few years later, in 1906. His propeller had variable-pitch blades. His engine was a two-cylinder, horizontally-opposed, double-acting four-stroke design — the pistons working on both sides, effectively giving him the power of four cylinders from two — and modern reconstructions have estimated its output anywhere from about 8 to 25 horsepower, with most settling around 15. The Wright engine, for comparison, delivered about 12.
Almost every one of those features is now standard. Modern aircraft are monoplanes. They have tricycle undercarriages. They use ailerons, not wing-warping. They have variable-pitch propellers. The Wright Flyer’s design — for all its historic primacy — was an evolutionary dead end within a decade. Pearse’s was, in effect, a sketch of the future.
The catch is that the sketch was crude. The aerodynamics were rough. The propeller was inefficient. The pilot’s controls were rudimentary. The engine, by Pearse’s own admission, often failed to develop full power. And Pearse’s flying field was a rough country road bordered by gorse hedges 12 feet high.
Pearse on Pearse
Here is the awkward part, and the part the Pearse partisans have never been able to fully explain away.
Pearse himself never claimed to have flown before the Wrights. In a feature published in the Clutha Leader on 30 November 1909, and again in letters to the Dunedin Evening Star in 1915 and 1928, he wrote that it was in February or March of 1904 that he “set out to solve the problem of aerial navigation.” In the 1915 letter, he was unambiguous: the honour of inventing the aeroplane belonged to many minds, but pre-eminence would go to the Wright brothers, “as they were actually the first to make successful flights with a motor-driven aeroplane.”
He went further. He didn’t think his own early efforts amounted to flight at all. By his strict definition — powered take-off followed by sustained, controlled travel through the air — he had achieved a powered take-off, but at “too low a speed for [his] controls to work,” and the rest had been an erratic descent into the nearest hedge.
So why do so many witnesses, dated by independent circumstantial evidence, place the events in 1903?
There are essentially three theories. The first is that Pearse was simply being honest and modest, and the witnesses, decades later, telescoped events and got the date wrong. The second is that Pearse, by 1915, had read enough about the Wrights to understand what real sustained, controlled flight looked like — and, holding himself to that standard, he genuinely no longer believed his own gorse-hedge hops counted, regardless of when they happened. The third — and arguably the strongest — is that the dates in his letters refer to when he began work on his second, much more ambitious aircraft, not his first.
That third theory has direct documentary support. The 1909 Clutha Leader piece is not describing the bamboo monoplane that the Waitohi witnesses saw — it’s describing a much larger machine, with a wing area of 700–900 square feet and a 24-horsepower engine, on which Pearse had “toiled for five long years.” In the same article, he tells the reporter that “last week’s was my most successful one, the machine rising readily.” That’s a documented 1909 take-off in his own words, in the same article in which he claims to have started nothing “practical” until 1904. It is hard to read it any other way: the 1904 start date refers to the machine he was demonstrating in 1909, not to whatever he was doing on the Main Waitohi Road in 1903.
Ogilvie, the most careful biographer, leans toward a combination of the second and third explanations. Pearse held himself to an exacting standard. He didn’t think much of the Wrights’ first efforts either, and was particularly critical of their later use of a “special catapult launching apparatus” — which was indeed introduced at Huffman Prairie from September 1904 — that he saw as cheating.
What “first to fly” actually means
The internationally recognised criteria for the first powered aeroplane flight, as set out by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), require all of the following: heavier-than-air, manned, powered, controlled, sustained from take-off to landing, and using mechanically unassisted take-off.
By that definition, the Wright brothers’ four flights at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903 are the consensus answer. They were heavier-than-air. They were manned, powered, and controlled. They were sustained — the longest covered 852 feet in 59 seconds. They were witnessed by five local citizens, photographed, and telegraphed home the same day. The Wrights, fairly, retain the title.
By the same strict reading, Pearse fails on at least two of the criteria. Even his most enthusiastic supporters concede that he probably did not achieve sustained, controlled flight in 1903. He took off. He stayed in the air for a few hundred metres. He crashed. His controls, he himself said, weren’t working.
What he did manage — and this is the claim that holds up — is something more specific and more interesting. He achieved a powered take-off from level ground, in a heavier-than-air machine of his own design, using no rails, ramps, slopes, or catapults, possibly nine months before any other human being did the same thing. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography puts it carefully: Pearse was, “by a wide margin (whether in 1902, 1903 or 1904), the first British subject to achieve a powered take-off in a heavier-than-air machine of his own design and construction.” Ogilvie estimates he was the fifth person in the world to manage a powered take-off of any kind.
Why the world never knew
The most puzzling thing about Pearse — assuming the witnesses are right about even the rough timing — is that nobody outside South Canterbury heard about it.
This was 1903. The telegraph existed. The international press was already saturated with aviation news, particularly in the United States and France. The Wright brothers’ own first flights, on a remote Outer Banks beach, were known about within weeks. If a New Zealand farmer had genuinely beaten them by nine months, somebody would have written about it.
And yet there is no contemporary newspaper coverage. There are no contemporary photographs of the aircraft in flight. There are no letters from Pearse to the Scientific American he so faithfully read. There is, until decades later, almost nothing.
The explanations are all variations on the same theme: Pearse was a recluse. He was secretive. He was the village eccentric — “Mad Pearse,” “Bamboo Dick” — and his neighbours, by and large, did not take him seriously. He was a failure as a farmer. He was treated, in Ogilvie’s words, “with considerable scepticism by most neighbours.” The local children, riding their ponies past his paddock, saw a strange man crashing into hedges, not the dawn of aviation.
By the time the world cared what had happened in Waitohi, it was the 1950s, and most of the witnesses were old. Pearse himself died in obscurity in a Christchurch psychiatric hospital in July 1953, five months before the 50th anniversary of Kitty Hawk. The bulk of his early aircraft — including the engine cylinders he had cast from drainpipes — was found in rubbish dumps in 1963.
The verdict
So, for Newswire readers, who was really first to fly?
The honest answer is that it depends on which question you’re asking.
If the question is who first achieved sustained, controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight by the international standard that aviation history has actually used for the past 120 years — that is the Wright brothers, on 17 December 1903, and the case is overwhelming. They were photographed. They were witnessed. They documented their work meticulously. They patented their controls. They went on, between 1904 and 1908, to demonstrate flights that no other human being could match. Nothing in the Pearse story dislodges that.
If the question is who first got a heavier-than-air, powered aircraft off the ground under its own steam — the answer is genuinely unsettled, and a New Zealand farmer has a respectable claim. Pearse very probably became airborne in his bamboo monoplane on 31 March 1903, eight or nine months before Kitty Hawk. He did so without rails, ramps, or catapults. He did so in a machine that — in nearly every detail except aerodynamic refinement — pointed toward the future of aviation rather than its past.
And if the question is who built the first aircraft that actually looks like the aircraft we fly today — monoplane configuration, ailerons, tricycle gear, variable-pitch propeller, level-ground take-off — then the answer is, somewhat extraordinarily, a self-taught farmer from Waitohi who couldn’t afford to go to engineering school.
Pearse’s tragedy, and his greatness, sit in exactly that gap. The Wrights had factories, capital, methodical scientific discipline, and the press of an entire continent at their back. Pearse had a paddock, a forge, a subscription to Scientific American, and gorse hedges. The Wrights perfected the aeroplane. Pearse, in his own phrase, simply “started out to solve the problem” — and got far closer, far earlier, than anyone in his own community ever realised.
He didn’t beat the Wright brothers to the prize. But he very probably beat them to the sky.
What do you think? Was Pearse robbed by history, or did he himself give us the most honest answer back in 1915 — that the Wrights got there first? Have your say in the comments.
Sources for this piece include the Clutha Leader of 30 November 1909 (via Papers Past), the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (Gordon Ogilvie, 1996), NZ History (Manatū Taonga, Ministry for Culture and Heritage), the Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT), New Zealand Geographic, the German Patent and Trade Mark Office’s profile of Pearse, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, NASA, and Britannica.