The Most Famous
INVENTORS from New Zealand
This page contains a list of the greatest New Zealander Inventors. The pantheon dataset contains 354 Inventors, 1 of which were born in New Zealand. This makes New Zealand the birth place of the 43rd most number of Inventors behind Turkey and Singapore.
Top 1
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary New Zealander Inventors of all time. This list of famous New Zealander Inventors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Richard Pearse (1877 - 1953)
With an HPI of 40.31, Richard Pearse is the most famous New Zealander Inventor. His biography has been translated into 18 different languages on wikipedia.
Richard William Pearse (3 December 1877 – 29 July 1953) was a New Zealand farmer and inventor who performed pioneering aviation experiments. Witnesses interviewed many years afterward describe observing Pearse flying and landing a powered heavier-than-air machine on 31 March 1903, nine months before the Wright brothers flew.: 21–30 Ambiguous statements made by Pearse himself make it difficult to date the aviation experiments with certainty. In a newspaper interview in 1909, with respect to inventing a flying machine, he said "I did not attempt anything practical with the idea until 1904".Biographer Gordon Ogilvie credits Pearse with "several far-sighted concepts: a monoplane configuration, wing flaps and rear elevator, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and a propeller with variable-pitch blades."Pearse largely ended his early flying experiments about 1911 but pioneered on in novel aircraft and aero-engine invention from 1933 with the development of his "private plane for the million", a foldable single-engined tiltrotor convertiplane.
Pantheon has 1 people classified as inventors born between 1877 and 1877. Of these 1, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased inventors include Richard Pearse.
