Richard William Pearse (3 December 1877 — 29 July 1953),son of Cornish immigrants from St Columb near Newquay, a New Zealand farmer and inventor who performed pioneering experiments in aviation.
Pearse supposedly successfully flew and landed a powered heavier-than-air machine on 31 March 1903, some nine months before the Wright brothers flew their craft. The documentary evidence to support such a claim remains open to interpretation, however, and he does not appear to have developed his aircraft to the same degree as the Wright brothers did, in respect of sustained, controlled flight. Pearse himself was not a publicity-seeker and also occasionally made contradictory statements which for many years led some of the few who knew of his feats to offer 1904 as the date of his first truly-controlled flight. The lack of any chance of industrial development, such as spurred the Wrights to develop their machine, seems to have suppressed any recognition of Pearse's achievements.
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