History
Frisbees were invented in the late 1930s by the American inventor Walter Frederick Morrison. Morrison and his future wife Lucile had fun tossing a popcorn can lid after a Thanksgiving Day dinner in 1937. They soon discovered a market for a light-duty flying disc when they were offered 25 cents for a cake pan that they were tossing back and forth on a beach near Los Angeles. In 2007, in an interview in The Virginian-Pilot newspaper, Morrison compared that with the 5 cents it cost back then: "'That got the wheels turning, because you could buy a cake pan for five cents, and if people on the beach were willing to pay a quarter for it, well—there was a business.'[5]"
The Morrisons continued their business until World War II, when Walter served in the Army Air Force flying P-47s, and then was a prisoner of war.[5] After the war, Morrison sketched a design for an aerodynamically improved flying disc that he called the Whirlo-Way, after the famous racehorse Whirlaway. He and business partner Warren Franscioni began producing the first plastic discs by 1948, after design modifications and experimentation with several prototypes. They renamed them the "Flyin-Saucer" in the wake of reported unidentified flying object sightings.[5]
"We worked fairs, demonstrating it," Morrison told the Virginian-Pilot. The two once overheard someone say that the pair were using wires to make the discs hover,[5] so they developed a sales pitch: "The Flyin' Saucer is free, but the invisible wire is $1.00." [6] "That's where we learned we could sell these things," he said, because people were enthusiastic about them.[5]
Morrison and Franscioni ended their partnership in early 1950,[5] and Morrison formed his own company in 1954 called American Trends to buy and sell "Flyin Saucers" (no hyphen after 1953), which were being made of flexible polypropylene plastic by Southern California Plastics, the original molder.[7] He discovered that he could produce his own disc more cheaply, and he designed a new model in 1955 called the Pluto Platter, the archetype of all modern flying discs. He sold the rights to Wham-O on January 23, 1957.[7]
In June 1957, Wham-O co-founders Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin gave the disc the brand name "Frisbee" after learning college students were calling the Pluto Platter by that term,[10] which was derived from the Connecticut-based pie manufacturer Frisbie Pie Company,[11] a supplier of pies to Yale University, where students started a campus craze tossing empty pie tins stamped with the company's logo—the way Morrison and his wife had in 1937.[5]
In November 1957, the Frisbee was featured in what may be the first rock musical, Anything & Everything, written by Ted Nelson. The game of Frisbee (spelled Frisby) is described in the song "Friz Me the Frisby," as a Frisbee was passed among stooges in the audience. The scene was expressly intended as a way to introduce the game to the audience.[12]
In 1964, Ed Headrick was hired as Wham-O's general manager and vice president of marketing. Headrick redesigned the Pluto Platter by reworking the mold, mainly to remove the names of the planets, but fortuitously increasing the rim thickness and mass in the process, creating a more controllable disc that could be thrown with higher accuracy.[13]
Wham-O changed their marketing strategy to promote Frisbee use as a new sport, and sales increased. In 1964, the first professional model went on sale. Headrick patented its design; it featured raised ridges (the "Rings of Headrick") that were claimed to stabilize flight.[14]
Headrick became known as the father of Frisbee sports;[15] he founded the International Frisbee Association and appointed Dan Roddick as its head. Roddick began establishing North American Series (NAS) tournament standards for various Frisbee sports, such as Freestyle, Guts, Double Disc Court, and overall events.[16] Headrick later helped to develop the sport of disc golf, which was first played with Frisbees and later with more aerodynamic beveled-rim discs, by inventing standardized targets called "pole holes".[17][18] When Headrick died, he was cremated, and his ashes were molded into memorial discs and given to family and close friends[19] and sold to benefit The Ed Headrick Memorial Museum.[20]
In 1998, the Frisbee was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.[21] Many championships have sprung up around the world and the sport became very popular, with nine-time champion Miguel Larrañaga from Spain being the leading exponent of frisbee throwing.
