As a german i hadn't heard of the wright brothers until my 20s. Otto Lilienthal is the name associated with the invention of airplanes here.
A half of year before Santos Dumont, also in Paris, there had been other flight attempts that had succeeded to take off completely unaided, by rolling on wheels (by Traian Vuia), but the achieved lengths of sustained flight had been much shorter, too short to qualify for any prize.
So while the achievements of Santos Dumont are very commendable, the word "invention" is not really appropriate for them, because all he had done was to do better some of the things already done by others in their attempts to win the French flight prizes.
The Wright brothers have started from Otto Lilienthal's work. While their improvements have been extremely important, their work has also not started from zero, but it had built upon the work of the predecessors.
In the history of inventions, it is typically impossible to say that something has really begun with some inventor. Instead of that, the right way is to point to each inventor and show what they have done better than what existed before them.
The idea of making an "airplane", with fixed wings and with screw propellers, had been widespread for most of the second half of the 19th century, and it had been discussed in countless publications and in "heavier-than-air" flight clubs.
However, before the Wright brothers, nobody had succeeded to build such an airplane that actually worked, the main reason being the lack of an appropriate system of aircraft controls, like that conceived by the Wright brothers.
The patent obtained by the Wright brothers, is formulated very well and of course it does not claim to have invented any new kind of flying machine, but it claims certain new and useful improvements in flying machines of the airplane kind (most of which refer to the aircraft control surfaces).
It wouldn't be appropriate to say "they were responsible for 100% of the technological development and research that led to this machine" but if that's what "invented" means then nobody has ever invented anything.
An airplane without good aircraft controls could start to fly without problems, but it would normally crash sooner or later, either due to flight instabilities or because it had to eventually land somewhere.
You come and adjust them. Did you just invent the bike? Or did you build upon my previous invention(s) and perfected it, making us both partial inventors?
People invent things. But "airplane" turned out to be much more than one thing. Not all of them were invented by Curtiss (a local favorite), or by Santos-Dumont, or by Lilienthal, Caproni, the Wrights, or whoever.
It's also fair to debate what qualifies as an airplane. If I were to list criteria, I would include two that the first Wright Flyer did not demonstrate: the ability to take off from level ground under its own power, and sufficient maneuverability to return to and land at the point of departure.
Their experiments with it ended when a gust flipped it on the ground and broke it beyond repair.
Edit: I cannot actually reproduce this with the automobile question, but asking ChatGPT-4o about the inventor of TV yields different answers:
Asking in German yields Paul Nipkow and Philo Farnsworth, asking in English yields Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird
Asking about Radio inventors in German yields Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, Marconi, Fessenden. In English it yields Marconi and Tesla.
- powered
- controlled
- heavier than air
- sustained
- flight
Oddly I don't recall much mention of Alberto Santos-Dumont either so, go figure.