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.
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