News and pictures of Mr. Rogallo’s work for NASA occasionally popped up in the news media. In 1954, Mr. Rogallo prophetically told Ford Times, a monthly publication of the Ford Motor Company, that he could envision men walking to the tops of hills and mountains and soaring away.

In Australia, people began to think the new wing might be just the thing for flying behind boats, while adventurous Americans imagined jumping off hills.

In an e-mail message, Nick Greece, editor of United States Hang Gliding and Paragliding Magazine, said the first person to build a glider using the Rogallo wing was Barry Palmer, who learned about Mr. Rogallo’s work in Aviation Week magazine in August 1961, and who two months later near Sacramento made the first flight.

Today about 50,000 people glide annually in the United States, with many paying more than $4,000 for gliders.

Francis Melvin Rogallo was born in Sanger, Calif., on Jan. 27, 1912, and caught the flying bug at 7 after a barnstormer flew over the town. Later, when he tried to join the military as a pilot, he was rejected because he had lost part of his right foot in a childhood accident, The Virginian-Pilot reported in 2003. He graduated from Stanford with a degree in mechanical and aeronautical engineering in 1935.

Although the aeronautics advisory committee showed no interest in Mr. Rogallo’s ideas, he was told he was welcome to work on them on his own time, his daughter said. So he and his wife used table fans and cardboard to erect wind tunnels at home. The result was his invention, the design of which they licensed to a kite maker.

His wife, the former Gertrude Sugden, who taught in a one-room school before they were married, died in 2008. Mr. Rogallo is survived by his daughters Marie Rogallo Samuels, known as Bunny, Carol Rogallo Sparks and Frances Rogallo MacEachren; his son, Robert; three grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.