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Post by errolmartyn on Aug 8, 2024 19:13:41 GMT 12
I do have a copy of a hand written letter by Pearse, written after the construction of his Converter Plane, in which he also describes his earlier experiments in 1903/1904, I will post on this forum at a later date. (Brucie, 21 Jul 24) No sign yet of the letter, but meanwhile . . . Read the patent, and look at the aircraft, everything that is described, from the "articulated" elevator, not hinged, the "wing rudders" and the bulging wing trusses of 3 ft is present. (Brucie, 21 Jul 24) Well, not quite ‘everything’, it seems, as Pearse in the Complete Specification of his 1906-1907 patent includes, for instance, a description of his propeller: ". . . The form of propellor [sic] that is preferred, consists of a pair of canvas sails s each one of which is stretched across between the ends of a pair of arms t extending from the shaft. . . ." (Figure 2 of the patent includes a drawing of the propeller.) The Mudrovcich machine, in contrast, features a four-bladed propeller with metal blades. Errol Dear oh dear, Errol, do you feel like you are going around in circles regarding this Pearse stuff? I feel an attack of vertigo coming on! Errol |
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Post by Dave Homewood on Aug 8, 2024 19:18:42 GMT 12
The upshot is there is no reliable evidence anywhere that Pearse flew first.
So the Wright Brothers retain their title as the first.
This will never change, no matter how much a few people wish it would.
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Post by brucie on Aug 8, 2024 19:42:10 GMT 12
There are two arguments getting mixed up here, whether Pearse flew before the Wrights, or whether Pearse attempted to fly before Nov 1909. The door is well and truly closed on the former, by Pearse's own admission, the Wrights claim that title of controlled flight and I do not argue with that.
But Errol has backed himself into a corner by sticking to the line that he did not even attempt to fly before Nov 1909. He must disregard eye witness accounts and Pearse's own words that he was a pioneer aviator at the same time as Orvile Wright.
When does Errol believe the 2 cylinder engine was built ?
I will leave it at that.
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Post by errolmartyn on Aug 8, 2024 20:26:43 GMT 12
There are two arguments getting mixed up here, whether Pearse flew before the Wrights, or whether Pearse attempted to fly before Nov 1909. The door is well and truly closed on the former, by Pearse's own admission, the Wrights claim that title of controlled flight and I do not argue with that. But Errol has backed himself into a corner by sticking to the line that he did not even attempt to fly before Nov 1909. He must disregard eye witness accounts and Pearse's own words that he was a pioneer aviator at the same time as Orvile Wright. When does Errol believe the 2 cylinder engine was built ? I will leave it at that. Looking forward to receiving copies of the eye-witness accounts of any pre-Nov 1909 flights by Pearse. By accounts I do not include those 'remembered' decades later. Errol |
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Post by brucie on Aug 8, 2024 20:37:40 GMT 12
Comment on the 2 cylinder engine !
I welcome your thoughts on the remains found , when did Pearse make this ?
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Post by Dave Homewood on Aug 8, 2024 22:30:28 GMT 12
New Zealand Times, 12 November 1909
Clutha Leader, 30 November 1909
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Post by errolmartyn on Aug 8, 2024 23:00:11 GMT 12
New Zealand Times, 12 November 1909 Clutha Leader, 30 November 1909 This Clutha Leader item is just a repeat of only about a third of the item originally published in The Timaru Post of 17 Nov 09. Errol |
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Post by nuuumannn on Aug 14, 2024 14:10:05 GMT 12
Icarus  Icarus built a powered flying machine??? Wow! This changes everything! |
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Post by nuuumannn on Aug 14, 2024 14:19:50 GMT 12
Comment on the 2 cylinder engine ! I welcome your thoughts on the remains found , when did Pearse make this ? Building an engine and building a flying machine are two different things. Again, any evidence on powered flight or attempts by Pearse before 1909 would be welcome, Brucie. You can discount eye-witness accounts made around fifty years later simply because people don't remember without prejudice. During the Preston Watson case investigations in 1953, when the claim was made by his brother James Watson that Preston flew in 1903, dozens of people came out of the woodwork claiming they saw Preston Watson flying in 1903. A year or so after making the claim, James Watson back tracked and denied the very thing he tried to promote a year earlier, saying it didn't happen. If you ask the right question some time afterwards, you can get people to agree to anything. "Did you see Richard Pearse fly in 1903?" "Oh yes, definitely, I was hanging out the washing, when suddenly..." |
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Post by Antonio on Aug 14, 2024 14:21:39 GMT 12
Icarus Icarus built a powered flying machine??? Wow! This changes everything! Yep: Armstrong Sideways powered |
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Post by nuuumannn on Aug 14, 2024 14:22:57 GMT 12
Icarus built a powered flying machine??? Wow! This changes everything! Yep: Armstrong Sideways powered Photos, or it didn't happen... |
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Post by Dave Homewood on Sept 21, 2024 13:08:21 GMT 12
I have never heard of this French bloke that flew in 1897... Also what happened to the engine that Lyon had? why did the RAeS and Federation Aeronautique Internationale not accept the facts offered? And does the Geraldine Council still have all that documentation?
As for the rest, it is up to speculation and interpretation of course.... and we know Pearse himself stated he never attempted anything till 1904, but there is a lot of supposed evidence here pointing to several flights.
From The Press, 4th of July 1970
World’s Second Flight Was In New Zealand
(By MAX C. AVERY)
A New Zealander, Richard William Pearse, was the second man to fly in a heavier-than-air machine. He flew almost two years before the Wright Brothers better-known effort at Kittyhawk on December 17, 1903.
Never credited with the honour so deservedly his, Pearse died in 1953, a retired farmer who had lived in to a jet age he could scarcely have dreamed of when his bamboo and canvas machine first took to the air on that memorable day of March 31, 1902.
There is no doubt as to the newly-established facts of the matter. Documented and authenticated, the affidavits have been lodged with the Geraldine County Council after 15 years of painstaking research by Mr J. D. Coll of Tauranga, New Zealand.
That Pearse was a pioneer aviator has never been disputed, but until Mr Coll began his investigation it was generally accepted that he flew in 1904; after the Wright Brothers. Having proved that Pearse was the second man to fly (he was beaten only by the Frenchman, Clement Ader, who flew at Satory, France, on October 14, 1897), and the first man to make a controlled flight in a heavier-than-air machine, which he made almost a year later to the day (and still six months before the Wright' Brothers’ first flight) Mr Coll is endeavouring to have the events recognised by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale.
A fellow-researcher, Mr C. G. Radliffe, of Auckland, is at present in England presenting the facts of the matter to the Royal Aeronautical Society. While there he will interview a New Zealander, Mr Gilbert Lyon, a World War II fighter pilot who at one time had possession of the second aero engine made by Pearse.
Worked Alone
Undoubtedly, the most remarkable feature of the Pearse flights was that he worked alone. Without scientific, technical or monetary assistance, without even the encouragement of his family and neighbours, for he was a man who kept his ideas to himself, he studied the theory of flight in his early 20s.
After a day working on his parents’ Waitohi farm, 18 miles north of Timaru, Richard Pearse would spend the evenings by the light of an old oil lamp, poring over books and journals pertaining to flight and ballooning. He wanted an internal combustion engine, so he designed one and built it on the farm. His first aircraft was powered by a two-cylinder horizontally-opposed engine of about 25 horsepower.
The machine was made mostly of bamboo struts and stringers with a covering of coarse canvas stretched below them. During early trials Pearse found that the canvas section immediately behind the propeller kept buckling, and being forced upward by the blast of air. This, to his mind, seemed to impede the progress of the machine, so he replaced it with a metal section made from the thin tin of golden-syrup cans, opened out, flattened and soldered together. It had a tricycle undercarriage, with a steering nose wheel.
On March 31, 1902, after spending the previous weeks getting the engine running properly, and getting the hang of taxiing the machine about, Richard Pearse decided to see if it would fly. He ran it out of the barn and down two wooden rails. There it stood, looking like a big flying wing, 20ft wide and 8ft in depth, from where the two-bladed propeller poked through, to the trailing edges.
It had a vertical stabiliser running the depth of the wing, and two aileron-type flaps on the outer edges of the wing, intended to turn the machine.
Off The Ground
Starting the engine (his brother Warne usually officiated in swinging the propeller, and often complained of the blast blowing his hat from his head), Pearse taxied about a quarter of a mile down the road from the Upper Waitohi School. Then he made the engine turn faster, and slowly the machine rose from the ground, flew at a height of a few feet for a distance estimated by eye-witnesses to be between 50 and 100 yards, veered to the left and landed on top of a high gorse hedge. Richard Pearse had flown.
There was no doubt about it, for the gorse hedge was between 10 and 12ft high, and there to prove it was the aircraft on top of it. Gorse hedges were to become very much a part of Richard Pearse and flying, for he landed on top of them four times in all—including the memorable controlled flight.
In fact, it was the gorse hedges of the Waitohi district which caused him to alter the design of his first aircraft. He found when taxiing along the roads, that the sharp leading corners of the wings tended to catch in the hedges on either side—so he rounded them off.
Date Established
Mr Coll has authenticated March 31, 1902 at the date of the flight quite simply. The morning after the flight Richard Pearse’s youngest sister, Ruth (Mrs Gilpin, now living in Auckland) went as usual to the Lower Waitohi School, and there she brightly announced: “My brother flew yesterday!” A fellow pupil, Ethel Bourne, quickly replied: “Surely you don’t expect me to believe that it’s April Fool’s Day today." This exchange took place in the presence of another of Pearse’s sisters, Florence (Mrs Higgins, living in Auckland) and Miss Ellen McAteer (living in Timaru).
Mr Coll discussed this conversation with the four women in the South Island a few years ago, and Miss McAteer produced her certificate of proficiency—showing she left the Lower Waitohi School at the end of the 1902 school year. Meanwhile, of course, Pearse was not concerned with the investigations which would be made in to his flights more than half a century later. He went on experimenting, flying, and landing on the top of gorse hedges. His next known flight was in the same aircraft, almost a year later to the day. And it was this flight which Mr Coll claims was the first controlled flight in the world.
30 Witnesses
The flight twice around the perimeter of a 25-acre paddock—a distance of about If miles—was witnessed by about 30 persons. The aircraft, now modified with the rounded-off wings, took off after a short run, bouncing across the grass, achieved a height of about 66ft, made two circuits of the field—and landed on top of a gorse fence. Pearse was actually bringing the aircraft in to a landing at the time, but apparently misjudged the height of the hedge. Mr Coll does not think this landing—which did not damage the aircraft precludes the flight from being controlled throughout its duration. The aircraft was so obviously under control through the flight, he has ascertained, it would have landed safely, without major damage to its undercarriage, had the hedge not intervened.
Pearse, having tasted the pleasures of flying, was keen to be airborne again. Obviously impressed by the controlled capabilities of his machine, he next took to the air on Easter Saturday, 1903. He took off from a 50ft terrace, about two miles east of Pleasant Point in the Waitohi district, and flew about half a mile up the Opihi River. After flying this distance safely, it seems he struck an airpocket, and the machine landed—again without serious damage—in 18in to 24in of water.
His next flight—the fourth time he was airborne in the machine—was only a few days later, on May 2, 1903. He made a take-off run of between 20 and 25 chains, became airborne, flew about 50 yards—and landed on top of a gorse hedge, again between 10ft and 12ft high. The flight was watched by the late Mr Amos Martin of Temuka, and Mr Coll has an affidavit from him, and also an affidavit from a person who observed the flight up the Opihi River.
Machine Scrapped
Sometime between July 11 and July 14, 1903, Richard Pearse made his fifth and last known flight in the aircraft. The flight was not observed, as far as is known, but the aircraft obviously became airborne, for once again it landed —on a high gorse hedge. It was apparently late in the day, because Pearse left the aircraft there, and that night there was a great snow-storm. The drifts piled up feet deep around the gorse hedges, and made the task of moving the plane so difficult it was left there for several days, during which it was seen by many people.
Soon after, Pearse scrapped the aircraft. But he did not lose his interest in aviation. In 1907 he patented the plans of a flying machine apparently based on his first aircraft, and in 1910 he built an aircraft with a circular wing, 45ft in diameter. It was powered by a four cylinder horizontally opposed engine of about 40 h.p.—once again, of Pearse’s own design and construction.
With it is the four cylinder engine from Pearse's second aircraft the only part recovered from the circular wing flying machine.
But Pearse had already made his mark. He had achieved the unique distinction of having flown entirely on his own efforts—and of having made all his flights before the Wright Brothers ever left the ground at Kittyhawk.
As far as is known, this aircraft once rose about 3ft from the ground, although Pearse was often seen taxiing it about, and making abortive take-off runs. Mr Coll remembers its construction being similar to the first machine bamboo frame, with canvas stretched underneath.
There was an open space, about eight feet in diameter, near the centre of the wing in which the engine was placed. The pilot stood on the undercarriage framework with his head and shoulders protuding through the space, a little above the engine. A dart-like tail was attached to the rear of the wing, and the undercarriage was once again tricycle—this time with a swivelling tail wheel. The engine drove a four-bladed propeller. The aircraft was tilted up in the front, when it sat on the ground, so the leading edge of the wing was about 7ft above the ground and the tail about three feet clear of it.
But the machine never made sustained flights—and neither did his third and last machine, which he designed and built when he was living in retirement in Christchurch in the late 1920 s and early 19305.
Novel Features
Although the third machine, a combination fixed wing aircraft and helicopter, had many novel features for its time, its maker never managed to secure a certificate of airworthiness from the now flight-conscious authorities, and today it is in the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland.
In addition, about the same time he had built a machine for recording the sound of his own voice—playing it back at such a volume the neighbours could hear it more than a mile away, and he had built himself a motorised bicycle.
As his sisters, Mrs Higgins and Mrs Gilpin of Auckland said recently: “What might he have done if he had backing from a big company or the Government?"
But Pearse had none of these. So quiet was his existence, so modest his manner, he just did not come to anyone’s notice, and it took Mr Coll 15 years of research, with the assistance of other interested people, to firmly establish the pioneer’s proper place at the very beginning of the history of aviation.
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