Talpade’s marutsakha was a cylindrical structure made of bamboo. The structure was apparently filled with liquid mercury. “When the mercury reacted with sunlight, it released hydrogen. And because hydrogen is lighter than air, it helped the aircraft fly,”

So… not powered flight? The Wright brother’s claim to fame was powered flight. There were gliders and lighter than air flight for years before them. The challenge was powering flight. External combustion (steam) engines did not have the power to weight to enable powered (winged) flight, although there were people working on this. It might have worked for lighter-than-air powered flight (and there’s an interesting synergy between the heat generated by external combustion and hot air balloons) — but I have no idea if anyone was working on this.

The Wrights, as bicycle designers/manufacturers/maintainers were exposed to the internal combustion engines being designed to power bicycles, and IC engines did have the power/weight to be usable for powered winged flight — but only just.

Also, liquid mercury is heavy. I got to use a few kilos for a HS science fair project (long story short: magnetohydrodynamics — school insisted I not use rocket exhaust for conductive plasma, offered me mercury as a replacement). I would not expect enough hydrogen to be in mercury to be able to lift the mercury itself, never mind a structure holding it.