This feels like a really stupid question but I genuinely don't know. Gliders existed before powered airplanes, right? So people would probably could have made paper airplanes for fun prior to the Wright Brothers, but I have no idea and just had this as a weird shower thought and was curious about it now.
China did it apparently https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/drones/a44112898/history-of-paper-airplanes/#:~:text=Chinese%20engineers%20are%20thought%20to,planes%20around%202%2C000%20years%20ago.
afaik yeah, they're like a thousand years old at least.
There's lots of examples in nature of things like those helicopter seed pods.
There are a lot of technologies where we've kind of known they would work for hundreds or thousands of years, but we were lacking some critical piece - usually high quality metal or rubber or ball beargins or something, to make it actually happen.
Yes, definitely. Michaelangelo made all kinds of flying machine designs way before flight was achieved, so flying machines were in the popular imagination centuries before it was achieved. Paper was invented millenia ago in Han China in the 2nd century and spread to the Muslim world by the 8th century.
Wikipedia says there is mention of paper planes in a British book as early as 1864, over a hundred years before modern aviation.
Icarus flapping around with artificial wings over 2k years ago.
And kites are really, really, really old.
Wait the Wright Brothers definitely invented the airplane before 1964 lmao
There were planes in WW1 and they were relatively new, so I wanna say like, 1910 for their invention?
Edit: I looked it up and Kitty Hawk was in 1903
As a matter of fact they totally did. Even kids. It's been a well known lil trick for at least hundreds of years, probably longer.
Probably yes, maybe they called them paper birds. There is total bird erasure in this thread.
I guess the ask community would've been more appropriate but I put it here because I thought everyone would think it's obvious and I was being a doofus, but thank you haha
