Francis Rogallo
Inventor of the Rogallo wing (1912-2009)
Francis Melvin Rogallo (January 27, 1912 – September 1, 2009) was an American aeronautical engineer inventor born in Sanger, California, U.S. Together with his wife, he is credited with the invention of the Rogallo wing, or "flexible wing", a precursor to the modern hang glider and paraglider. His patents were ranged over mechanical utility patents and ornamental design patents for wing controls, airfoils, target kite, flexible wing, and advanced configurations for flexible wing vehicles.
Career
Francis Rogallo earned an aeronautical engineering degree at Stanford University in 1935. Since 1936, Rogallo worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) as an aeronautics project engineer at the wind tunnels. During 1948, he and his wife, Gertrude Rogallo, invented and patented a self-inflating flexible kite. They called this kite the "flexible wing". Rogallo had originally invented the wing with the idea to create an aircraft which would be simple enough and inexpensive enough that anyone could have one. The wing was flown by Rogallo as a model glider with small payloads hung beneath the wing (thus model hang glider) and as a kite.
The Rogallo wing is one of the simplest airfoils ever created. A wing using the airfoil could be used to carry payloads, undercarriage devices, pilot-control assemblies, etc.
The public source identifies “Francis Rogallo” as inventor of the Rogallo wing (1912-2009). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Francis, Rogallo and Inventor.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 24, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q1441723. VIAF identifies the subject as 46451360. The Library of Congress control number is no2003056960. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912, 2009, 1935 and 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francis Rogallo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.