A Brief History
On January 23, 1957, inventor Walter Morrison sold his plastic flying disc to the Wham-O company, which named the item “Frisbee” and has now sold over 100 million of the tossable toys!
Digging Deeper
The invention dates back to the 1930s when Morrison got the idea by throwing the lid to a popcorn can before graduating to cake pans. Now made of plastic and copied by numerous companies, the beauty of the Frisbee is in its simplicity, with no moving parts, no batteries, and low cost.
After serving as a fighter pilot during World War II and time as a POW, Morrison perfected his design with improved aerodynamics and use of plastic calling the gizmo the Whirlo-Way. The toy was renamed the Flyin-Saucer in keeping with the UFO mania of the time. By 1955, Morrison refined his creation and renamed it, this time as the Pluto Platter, which was the version sold to Wham-O.
Wham-O got the Frisbee name from Yale University students who were throwing pie pans made by the Frisbie Pie Company that sold pies to Yale.
Not content with just playing catch, Frisbee aficionados developed other games using the saucers, including Disc Golf, Ultimate Disc and Freestyle Disc as well as Disc Dog, getting pets in on the fun. Not bad for something that began as the lid to a can!
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Have you played any of the Frisbee games?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Muirhead, Margaret. Flip! How the Frisbee Took Flight. Charlesbridge, 2021.
Walikainen, Dennis. Platinum Platter:: 70 Years of Guts Frisbee. Independently published, 2024.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of Morrison promoting his Pluto Platters, the forerunner of the Frisbee, in the 1950s, is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1930 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice. For further explanation, see Commons:Hirtle chart as well as a detailed definition of “publication” for public art.
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