Two guys who grew up on farms. Both were tinkerers.
Benjamin Banneker, a free Black American created the first striking clock built in America.
Richard Pearse, from New Zealand, was a pioneer in flight. Was he a first? We don’t know for sure. But he was pretty interesting!
Transcription: Benjamin Banneker, by Mick Sullivan
Clocks! It’s easy to take ‘em for granted – amirite? I mean, take a look around and see how many different ways you can check the time in your surroundings right now! I’d bet it’s quite a few. Maybe you’ve got one on your wall. Or bedside table. Or microwave, Or if you’re in the car, there’s probably one on the dashboard. Of course, if you’re like me, there’s a 50/50 chance that one’s correct. Setting the time back and forth each Daylight Savings doesn’t always happen with every clock in my life. But if your car clock is wrong, no bother: look out the window – there’s probably a sign at a bank or other business showing the time within eyesight. And of course, most people these days probably check the time most often on their phone or similar digital device.
Almost all of these timepieces, except for maybe the clock on your wall or wrist, are digital. They show numbers, or digits, to tell you the current hour and minute. Digital clocks really came into people’s lives throughout the 1900s. Analogue Clocks – the round ones with the hour and minute hand that go in a circle, are older, and to be honest, kind of a mechanical marvel.
All of this is to say that in homes of the past, clocks were not very common. If you grew up before the 1800s, it was pretty likely that if there was a clock in your life, it was on a tower in town – probably a church or a courthouse. Not that many people had clocks of their own. So when a guy named Benjamin Banneker saw his friend’s new pocket watch in the 1750s, he was fascinated. This watch had been imported from England and practically any other clock or watch in America at the time had been as well – there were quite a few highly skilled and dedicated craftspeople in Europe who knew the delicate details of gears and springs and metal fittings and perfect ratios. It was pretty amazing to Benjamin.
Do you mind if I take it apart?
What, you mean like break it? Uh, No.
No man, I don’t want to break it. I want to see how it works.
Sounds like you’re gonna break it. Do you even know how to put a clock together?
Well no. That’s why I wanna take it apart.
But…um…that doesn’t sound good to me. It was expensive. It’s rare. Ben, it’s my new pocket watch.
I know I’ve never seen one like this up close! It’s awesome!
Right. But do you see the problem? You wanna take it apart. But don’t know how it works. I wanna keep my watch…functioning…like the expensive watch it is. This just doesn’t seem like a win for me. What if you can’t put it back together?
I think I can figure it out.
Somehow Benjamin Banneker convinced his pal to let him take the watch apart to learn how it worked. His buddy probably thought that was the end of his short relationship with the watch, but Benjamin was meticulous. As he took the complex yet small machine apart, he made detailed drawings and diagrams – all by hand – for his use later. With everything neatly in pieces, Benjamin could understand how the cogs and gears worked when the time piece was wound, and how it kept accurate time as the minutes and hours of each day went by. Satisfied, he carefully put everything back together, and sure enough it worked like a charm. So he gave it back to his pal, who was certainly pleased to hear it ticking as it once had.
Benjamin couldn’t help but want one himself. With the drawings he made, he basically had a set of plans – if only he could create something so perfect and delicate. It would take time and materials – but he didn’t have the resources to create one with metals. He did have wood though – maybe he could make that work. Amazingly, Benjamin carefully crafted the pieces of a clock, and assembled it from wood. And sure enough his wooden clock, it kept perfect time. His was a striking clock – meaning it could sound an alarm on the hour, and for that he did have some metal – an iron bell, struck to make the noise. Benjamin Banneker’s Clock which he made in 1753, while he was in his 20s, was the very first striking clock made anywhere in the America. This clock would keep time for the rest of his life.
The people who knew Benjamin were probably not surprised. He was smart – that was clear. He always had been. Benjamin had been born in Maryland in 1731 – four decades before American Independence. His parents were Black and free, which meant Benjamin Banneker was too. 130 years before the Civil War, Benjamin Banneker’s family was not enslaved. They weren’t alone in their freedom, but it was not common. There’s a lot of mystery about his early life. He probably went to school – but probably just in the winters – during the warm months there was too much work to do on the family farm. If he did go to school, it didn’t last long. But as you might guess from his clock deconstruction efforts, he had a curious and mathematical mind and he was always eager to read and understand the world around him.
As an adult, he took over the family farm near Baltimore and became friends with a family who moved nearby to operate a mill. The Ellicot family were Quakers who believed in industriousness, equality, and education. So they had a lot of books and even some scientific equipment which they lent to the full-grown Banneker. Astronomy had captured his imagination, and after his duties running his farm, Benjamin threw himself into the study of astronomy.
With no formal training and little more than the books he could borrow or buy, he began recording astronomical observations, working hard to understand the movement of the celestial bodies in the sky. In 1789, he predicted a solar eclipse. This is notable because there were other, more schooled and published astronomers who disagreed. Were they right? They were worse than right. They were wrong. Benjamin’s prediction was correct. Most sources say the day of Banneker’s predicted eclipse was April 14th, 1789. If so, that’s curious, because that happens to be the same day the George Washington, back home in Mount Vernon, learned that he was unanimously elected as the first President of the United States.
By 1791, two years later, Benjamin had ventured into publishing. Connecting his growing knowledge of astronomy, farming, and general information, he published the first of many Farmer’s Almanacs. Banneker’s Almanac, officially known as “Banneker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac, or Ephemeris” was one of many such annually released books. These usually had valuable information for farmers like seasonal trends, sunrise and sunset charts, weather predictions, tide charts and the like. Where other almanacs had poems or stories as well, Banneker’s was unique in that it included political and social commentary. Much of that commentary was about the unjust treatment of other Black Americans held in bondage.
And Benjamin Banneker sent a copy of his detailed almanac, along with a detailed letter directly to Thomas Jefferson. In his famous booklet Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson stated a racist belief about the superiority of white people. Banneker called him out on it, and said it was blatantly wrong. He said Jefferson was duty bound to do what he could as then-Secretary of State and one of the most powerful men in America to fix the unjust enslavement of so many humans.
Jefferson was impressed and commended Benjamin Banneker. But he did not retract his statements.
It was also around this time that Thomas Jefferson had brokered a deal – primarily between James Madison and a guy named Alexander Hamilton – to determine where America would place its permanent capitol. A new district was carved out of Maryland and Virginia – mostly swampland. But it would become Washington D.C.
However, before a city can be made, and stones can be laid, the land must be surveyed. A surveying crew would have to spend months in the physical space, measuring land elevations, distances, natural features, and then map all of this. It was an important 3-dimensional mathematical job for a crack team. Chosen to lead the job was Andrew Ellicott, one of the Ellicott family members Benjamin had befriended years ago. And who did he hire to work on the surveying crew? None other than Benjamin Banneker – now 60 years old.
After the surveying work of Washington DC was complete, Banneker returned home, where his clock still kept time. He tended to his farm, entertained visitors, and continued to study science. It seems around this time he took an interest in the cycle of those occasional bug invaders – cicadas. As his clock ticked, he continued to publish his almanac for a few more years, and wrote often in favor of the anti-slavery movement. On October 19th, 1806, Benjamin Banneker died. On the day of his funeral, or the following day, depending on the source, his cabin caught fire and burned. Among the valuable things lost that day were his letters and journals. All evidence would indicate that his wooden clock burned that day as well.
Today in Oella, Maryland, there is an obelisk dedicated in his honor, not far from his unmarked grave in the family plot. Benjamin Banneker is remembered as a polymath – extremely talented in more ways than one – and someone who left his mark on the world and worked for justice and knowledge.
That’s definitely worth celebrating.
Richard Pearse, by Mick Sullivan
If you’re looking for long lost history, sometimes you might have to go looking through the trash. Luckily a New Zealand man named George Bump didn’t mind getting his hands dirty and in 1958, he pulled aviation history from a rubbish dump. As a pilot and airplane enthusiast himself, Mr. Bump knew what he was looking at – not trash, but a remarkable one-of-a-kind engine designed by a cello-playing farmer who may, or may not, have been the first person to fly a motorized airplane. That cello-playing farmer was Richard Pearse, and his achievements in flight are not as well-known as his contemporaries like Wilbur and Orville Wright, but perhaps his feats were more impressive because he crafted his air craft mostly alone, mostly from recycled parts – and without access to most of the information scientists were sharing about flying at the time. Luckily Mr. Bump saved Pearse’s engine from the rubbish heap of history, and found a few more of Pearse’s things over the years.
Here’s some advice – if you ever invent things, discover things, create things – or are responsible for any advancement of any sort, you should keep notes. Documents are proof and make great tools for historians to organize timelines of the past. Unfortunately, Richard Pearse, didn’t keep great records, so few artifacts and documents survive today. So to piece his story together, Mr. Bump and a few others interviewed a few witnesses many years after Pearse’s experiments, and their memories seem clear for the most part. Especially the one about Pearse’s plane – crashed and stuck tail side up in a hedgerow. No one is sure, but Richard Pearse might have flown his airplane months before ol’ Orville and Wilbur made history at Kitty Hawk. But we just don’t know.
Richard Pearse grew up with very curly hair on a New Zealand farm, near the town of Temuka. It was remote – not a lot of people around, as the many big farms there spaced everyone out. Neighbors were pretty far away. Luckily, Richard had a bunch of brothers and sisters – he was somewhere in the middle of nine. Having this many kids on a farm was probably good – lots of help with the work. But the family liked to enjoy life too, and not just spend their time on chores, so they built a tennis court and would have family tournaments to blow off steam. One of his brothers was so good with the racket, he went professional. But the family also had an artistic side – all the kids learned music and started a family orchestra. There were Pearse siblings on harp, piano, violins, violas and Richard on the cello. His cello was a great treasure to him which he would keep and play for the rest of his life.
Richard liked to enjoy life a little more than working on a farm. But not in a slackery, lazy kind of way. Enjoying life for him was disappearing into his own mind and getting mechanical.
Cello, I’m RICHARD PEARSE (Robot Voice)
No, I don’t mean Richard pretended to turn into a robot, I mean he got mechanical with his creativity. Richard was a tinkerer. If his parents could have sent him to college, he probably would have made a good engineer. He liked to design, build, and solve problems. So if the family lost track of him, they’d probably find him in the barn inventing something new – maybe even a tool to help on the farm. For that reason, things that broke were never discarded. They were re-used.
At the library, Richard would learn what he could about science, mathematics, and engineering. This drive to learn is something he carried with him through life – just like that cello. When he grew up and kept a farm of his own, he had very little interest in actually farming. He often hired people to help. That gave him time to focus on whatever he wanted to focus on. Townsfolk remember him running errands with a book in his hand, which he’d bury his nose in at any small chance – like waiting in line or at a train crossing. Most found him odd, but interesting. Just like his early inventions.
Cello! I’m Richard Pearse have I got something to show you!
Are you tired of moving your bike by pedaling in circles? Your feet just go round and round and round – amirite? What if I told you instead, that your feet could go up and down! Sounds great, right? Well, now they can – with my new bamboo bicycle you just pump the pedals up and down to move yourself. It’s up and downright amazing!
And – this is the best part – no more flat tires as you make your way about town as a busy cyclist. The tires are self-inflating, and can even inflate while you’re in motion. No need to stop!
Richard’s bamboo frame bike was a really great idea, but it never really took off. Part of the reason might be because he was more obsessed with getting something else to take off – an airplane.
From a hodgepodge of materials, Richard worked to build a plane. He knew other people were working on planes of their own around the world, but he was working mostly alone and far away from all of them. That made him unusual. Yes unusual in the history books – in a good way. And unusual to the people in his area – in a not so good way. Most people thought he was bananas. As a farmer, shouldn’t he spend his time worrying about, oh I don’t know…farming? What’s the point in creating something that’s never gonna work? Never gonna work was one viewpoint, shouldn’t work was another. More than handful of people felt he was behaving blasphemously. If people were meant to fly, then God would have made them fly. They believed creating such a vehicle was against the laws of nature and their creator.
It seems like it was easy for Richard to tune them out. Because he built a plane. Amazingly, he was working on it at the same time the Wright Brother were working on theirs – and like them he had built and worked on bicycles. Some bicycle, or rather tricycle, inspiration wound up on Richard’s plane – It had one pair of wings, connected, and very high above where the pilot sat. There was a bike seat at the bottom of a tubular steel frame with three bicycle tires. He had got some pointers from a mechanic in the area when it came to the engine – this was a point of pride for Richard. It was made of many recycled parts, including some old iron drainpipe – and he believed it was the best, lightest engine in the world at the time. Meaning it was very powerful, while also not very heavy – a good benefit for an airplane. Especially an airplane made of bamboo. Other than the tricycle frame and recycled fabric wings – the plane was made of bamboo.
It’s hard to know exactly when he made his first attempt at flight. As we mentioned – not many records remain. All we have is the recollection of witnesses – and sometimes memories can be spotty many years after the fact. Some of the people there were neighbors. A few family members were probably there too. A few people said a local teacher cancelled her classes and took some students to watch. Most agree about what they saw. All agree about what they heard – the machine was so unbelievably loud that the grating, rattling cacophony of harsh metal echoed from New Zealand hilltops and across fields in all directions. Whenever he was working, people for miles around knew it. And they certainly heard it when he readied his plane to fly above a field not far from the town of Waitohi.
The engine started, the propeller spun, and the winged bamboo machine began to move. Jostling and bouncing on the ground, he gained speed, until the bicycle tires left the earth. As he rose, the air was no less violent. Richard and his plane were still jostling and rocking. Try as he might, he never really got control. But he flew about 100 meters – around 330 feet. And then he came down – right into a hedgerow. Tail up – nose in the plant. A classic crash landing. Someone took a photo – because who had ever seen such a thing before! Richard worried he might have dislocated his shoulder. So he went to the hospital before extracting the plane – turns out he was fine. Dude just got a little banged up.
This might have happened a few months before the Wright brothers. It might have happened a few months or even a year after. We just don’t know for sure because the evidence we have is scant. The photo might be a key, and the log book from the hospital would certainly have the date of Richard’s crash-related injury. But the photo was lost in a house flood. And the hospital burned down – along with all the paper records they kept. Richard didn’t leave us the date on any related documents, so all we have is people’s memories. And memory can be very faulty.
But here’s the thing – we know how Richard felt about it. The date didn’t matter. He said he wasn’t the first in controlled motorized flight. In any case, it probably was the Wrights.
Cello! I never had control!
And that is the key. He could have lied, he could have raised a fuss, he could have forced himself into the history books. But he wasn’t that kind of guy. He knew he never had control of the flight. He also probably considered it lucky that he survived. Richard was honest, if unsatisfied with his work. Which is honorable. Plenty of other people should take note.
He set that plane aside, but didn’t stop entirely. He actually spent the later years of his life working on a new plane – a radical one with a propeller system that could shift from facing forward to facing up, above the pilot – not unlike a helicopter. This would allow it to take off from any location – with runway space or without – straight up from a hilltop, for instance. It also had wings that could fold up and fit in a typical barn. His dream was to create a plane that would make flying as easy and accessible to everyone as cars had done for driving. For the most part that dream died with him, when he passed away in 1953. But the memory of his place in early flight has not – he’s often honored in New Zealand for his achievements and creative spirit. Many of his surviving engine and plane pieces are in museums there – mostly thanks to George Bump who saved them from an eternity alongside trash.
Richard may not have been the first in controlled airplane flight, but he knew he was a leader and that New Zealand minds like his belonged in the conversation. He wrote this to in a New Zealand paper over decade after the first flight:
I may say that my object is to show that New Zealand brains anticipated the essential features of the aeroplane. If I have claimed anything unduly, I want to know it, as I am open to correction. All my experimenting in aerial navigation was pioneer work, and when a history of the pioneers is being written I hold that I am within my rights in asserting my claims.
Claim heard, Richard! Now we know your name!
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