If you ever have fun tossing around a flying disc, or play Ultimate Frisbee or Frisbee Golf, you’ll be glad to know that today is the day that Walter Morrison was born in the US in 1920. In 1937, Morrison and his girlfriend Lucile were tossing back and forth a metal lid from a large can of popcorn. That was the moment, he later said, that the idea for the Frisbee popped into his head (he’s lucky it wasn’t a lid from a can of grease).
The popcorn lid got bent, and the pair tried a cake pan instead. It worked better, and cake pans were easier to find. They took their game to the beach, where someone offered them 25 cents for it. Many years later, Morrison mentioned it: 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.
And indeed they did start that business. They called it Flyin’ Cake Pans, and sold them on the beaches near Los Angeles. Morrison married Lucile, and when World War II came along he became a pilot. That taught him something about aerodynamics, and in 1946 he designed a disc that would fly better than a cake pan. By 1948 he found an investor willing to pay for a mold, and they started selling plastic discs called Flyin-Saucers. They didn’t sell very many though, and his investor walked away. Morrison kept at it, and started producing his own discs. He refined the design in 1955 and changed the name to Pluto Platter. That was the one that he sold to the Wham-O toy company in 1957. It even came with instructions: Flat Flip Flies Straight – Tilted Flip Curves, Experiment!
Wham-O was able to market the toy more successfully, and found out that college students at Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth called the discs “Frisbies” after the pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company. So they changed the name of the toy to “Frisbee” and the rest, as they say, is history.
By the way, Morrison may have been the first to dream up the idea of commercializing the game of tossing a disc, but there’s plenty of evidence that people had been doing the same thing with pie tins and the like since the 1800s.
