Peter Foy, who died February 17 at age 79, was the wizard who designed the technology that allowed Peter Pan to fly – from Jean Arthur and Mary Martin in the 1950s through Sandy Duncan and Cathy Rigby in more recent productions.

His patented wire, harness, and pulley contraptions levitated such diverse talents as Sally Field in “The Flying Nun,” Racquel Welch in “Fantastic Voyage, “and Michael Jordan in sneaker commercials. He once flew 15 acrobats in a revolving formation at the Osaka Flower Show, and his company, Flying by Foy, was responsible for many of the spectacular stunts at the opening of the Athens Olympics, including “Cube Man” and the flying torch relay.

Foy liked to call himself an airographer. It was a word he deserved to coin, because for many decades he was among its very few practitioners, and among those the most expert.

True, theatrical levitation has a long and august history, stretching from the ancient Greeks, who liked to use a rope to hoist a deus ex machina, in medias res.

Suspended performers were long a feature of seasonal British fairy plays. Kirby’s Flying Ballets, an organization that dated back to the mid-19th century, engineered the most accomplished examples. It was Kirby who, at J.M. Barrie’s urging, made it possible for Peter Pan and the Darling family’s children to fly in the first production of the play, in London in 1904. It is said that the simulation was so realistic that children were injuring themselves in imitation attempts, forcing Barrie to add lines explaining that flight was impossible without the scarce ingredient of “fairy dust.”

An aspiring actor, Foy in 1940, at age 15, appeared as a flying sea witch in a London production of a classic Edwardian-era fairy play, “Where the Rainbow Ends.” When the stage manager took ill, Foy found himself supervising all of the flying, which had been designed by Kirby. After serving briefly in the Royal Air Force as an entertainment officer, Foy went to work for Kirby.

It was thus as a lineal descendent of the original production that Foy came to New York to supervise the flying in the 1950 production of “Peter Pan” starring Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff, with music by Leonard Bernstein. It is a measure of the importance of flying in that production that the (uniformly enthusiastic) critics barely mentioned it, except, in the case of the Wall Street Journal, to note: “The physical aspects of the play were exceptionally good, especially the levitation of the children by skillfully manipulated wires.”

In 1954, a new musical version of the play opened on Broadway starring Mary Martin, the hottest musical star of the day, who was fresh off now-legendary performances in “Annie Get Your Gun” and “South Pacific.” Choreography was by Jerome Robbins, and he made great use of Foy’s newest cable innovation, the “Inter-related Pendulum,” a device that made directional flying more convincing than ever. Wrote Brooks Atkinson of Martin’s “Peter Pan”: “She has more appetite for flying and swinging than any of her more demure predecessors.” Foy, recalling rehearsals during a 2002 NPR interview, said, “Mary started yelling, ‘Fly me higher, faster!’ … and I started doing it. I flew beyond the limits of the equipment.” It was sweat-drenched Foy himself who was pulling at the other end of the cable suspending the lithe Martin. “You adjust the routine to the capabilities of the performer,” he explained. “If it’s somebody like Mary Martin, you jerk the hell out of her.”

Foy’s flying production for “Peter Pan” set the standard, and he soon founded Flying by Foy to support productions of the play, which now number in the thousands.

A restless tinkerer, Foy constantly improved his machinery and was issued a number of patents for configurations that made it even more adaptable and precise. He said he had occasionally made mistakes – he once dragged Liberace offstage and another time he smacked Martin into a brick wall – but there were few such episodes.

Having first worked in television for a nationwide broadcast of “Peter Pan” in 1955, Foy was a natural choice to make people fly on the small screen. In 1959, he helped depict a weightless environment for an America that had never witnessed it in the brief CBS series “Men Into Space.” In a most terrestrial but equally thrilling turn, he created levitation effects for “The Flying Nun.” In 1965, he developed the “Multi-Point Balance Harness” to portray miniaturized aquanauts in “Fantastic Voyage.”

Foy’s organization grew to encompass offices in Las Vegas and London under the rubric Inventerprises Inc. In addition to engineering the majority of “Peter Pan” productions, he was much in demand for spectacles like rock concerts, the traveling Ice Capades, and the Radio City Easter Show, as well as Broadway productions such as “The Who’s Tommy” and “The Lion King.” His organization’s work will be seen in “Spamalot” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” productions set to open on Broadway in coming months.

Foy remained involved with his company to the end, but tended in later years to take on only projects that particularly interested him. One such was “Superman,” a 1992 revival of a 1966 musical.

“You don’t want Superman’s head bobbing up in the air or, worse, his bottom,” Foy explained. “Peter Pan can dance, but Superman is a bullet.”

Peter Stuart Foy

Born June 11, 1925, in London; died February 17 in Las Vegas of natural causes. Survived by his wife, Barbara; son, Garry; daughter, Teresa, and two grandchildren.