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His dream of flying

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Pearse's farm was surrounded by very tall gorse hedges, so it was very private. None of his neighbours could see what he was doing there. He turned the cottage on the farm into a workshop, and he used to work through the night on his inventions. He designed and built his own lathe and forge (from cast-offs found at the tip), and rather than tending to the farm, spent most of his time inventing gadgets. The first output of this one-man factory was an ingenious style of bicycle. Patented in 1902, it was made out of a bamboo frame. By 1899, when the first cars were only just appearing on the roads (and not in Temuka, where people still used horses and carriages), Richard Pearse starting working on his ideas of how he could build a flying machine.

His neighbours thought he was crazy, and he lived far away from any university or centre of technology where people could understand what he was trying to do. He kept up with what was happening overseas by reading magazines like Scientific American - often walking behind a horse-drawn plough with his head buried in the latest issue of the magazine. Pearse was not able to buy suitable engines for his planes, so he had to build his own from scratch.

He finally came up with a very light engine, that annoyed his neighbours even more because it was noisy and frightened the cows!