South Africa was not immune to the worldwide fascination with the idea of flight that swept the world in the late 1800s and continued through the Wright Brothers' first successful powered flight in 1903 and the years that followed. South African John Goodman Household is among the many contenders for recognition as the first person to fly a heavier-than-air contraption. According to local accounts (and as commemorated by a family memorial near Curry's Post in the KwaZuluNatal Midlands), in the early 1870s Household and his brother built a glider and launched it from the top of a 300-meter precipice and flew over a kilometer.
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