Kiwis hail farmer who beat the Wright brothers into the air

As every schoolchild knows, the world's first powered flight was made by the Wright brothers, taking to the skies above Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.

Or was it? Nine months earlier, a little-known New Zealand farmer, Richard Pearse, climbed into a bamboo monoplane and flew for about 150 metres before crashing into a gorse hedge on his South Island property.

The flight was witnessed by family members and a scattering of locals from nearby Waitohi, a small farming community. But no documentary evidence of it has survived. Pearse left no journal or diary. A picture of his plane stuck in the hedge, taken by a local photographer, was lost in a flood. Hospital records relating to a shoulder injury he suffered in the crash were destroyed in a fire.

Nevertheless, New Zealanders are convinced that Pearse has been deprived of a place in the history books, and a group of aviation enthusiasts gathered at the weekend at Timaru, near Waitohi, to celebrate the centenary of his flight on 31 March 1903. The Pearse devotees had made two replicas of his plane, which they tried to get airborne with the help of a modern microlight engine.

The air show at Timaru airfield will be dwarfed by the celebrations planned in the United States later this year to mark the centenary of the flight by Orville and Wilbur Wright. But Pearse's family and supporters believe he has been unjustly overlooked. "He got airborne before the Wright brothers," said his 83-year-old nephew, also called Richard Pearse. "He deserves all the recognition that's going."

Geoff Rodliffe, a historian who wrote a book on Pearse, said there were five convincing accounts of his attempts to get airborne between 1902 and 1904. A farm worker, Amos Martin, recorded a flight on 2 May 1903. "It taxied 50 yards, rose 10 to 15 feet, flew 15 yards, then crashed into a hedge," he wrote. "I got on my bike and hightailed off."

On another occasion, Pearse landed in a dry riverbed, alarming a horse. He was, by all accounts, an eccentric man who neglected his farm to pursue his obsession with flying. A self-taught aviator and inventor, he was nicknamed Mad Dick and Bamboo Pears" by his neighbours. He built a bicycle out of bamboo, too. "Pearse was very much a recluse," said Graham McCleary, secretary of the Timaru aviation centre. "He was laughed at by the locals." Pearse designed and built his light-bodied craft, which had a home-made engine and a triangular frame of iron suspended beneath cloth-covered wings fashioned from bamboo. He recycled metal from old tobacco tins, made his own spark plugs and built cylinders for his primitive internal-combustion engines from iron water pipes. His first propellers were wooden; later versions had blades cut from metal drums.

Pearse played down his achievements, saying that the Wright brothers' flight – unlike his – was fully controlled. Not until after he died, in a psychiatric hospital in 1953, was his contribution to early aviation was acknowledged.

Many of Pearse's designs proved ahead of their time, and aviation experts say his plane bears a striking resemblance to modern microlights. Rusted parts from one engine were found on an old rubbish heap, with a propeller. These enabled enthusiasts to construct the replicas.

Pearse's nephew said that his father, Warne, witnessed the flight 100 years ago. "My father used to help him, spinning the propeller to start the engine," he said. The eccentric farmer's ambition had been to fly to Temuka, nine miles away, to go shopping. He never made it.