Following news this month of the death of Fred Morrison, the inventor of the Frisbee, DAVID ADAMS takes a look at how the ubiquitous flying disc came to be created…
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Some of the Frisbees featured at the Frisbee Collective. |
Once known as the ‘Pluto Platter’, the Frisbee owes its origins to the lid of a popcorn tin and an idle moment on a picnic.
The story goes that Fred Morrison and his girlfriend, Lu Nay, were on a Thanksgiving picnic in the mid-1930s when they started throwing a tin popcorn lid back and forth in an impromptu game. Finding that a tin cake pan was more aerodynamic, they were tossing it around on Santa Monica beach in California a year later when somebody offered them 25 cents for it – which led to them setting up a small business.
They continued to sell the tins until Morrison served as a pilot in World War II (he was shot down and served time as a prisoner of war). Back in the US after the war, he took up the idea of the flying disc once more and in 1946 came up with a design for what he now called the Whirlo-Way.
Gaining financial backing from another former pilot, Warren Franscioni, they began manufacturing the discs in plastic and selling them as the ‘Flyin’ Saucer’. In the mid 50s, he split with Franscioni and started making his own – the Pluto Platter – and in 1957, he and his now wife sold the marketing rights to for the platter toy company Wham-O.
It was Wham-O – which also marketed, among other things, the Hula Hoop – which came up with the name Frisbee, a name Morrison later admitted he thought was “terrible”. (The name apparently came from the Frisbie Pie Co which sold pies to colleges where students had, a couple of decades before, discovered the joys of throwing the pie dishes and had called them ‘Frisbies’, a name which they then also applied to ‘Pluto Platters’.)
Morrison was awarded a patent for his disc in 1958 and as many as 200 million have since been sold. Improvements in the design – notably the addition of ridges to the top – also led to the creation of a number of sports including ‘disc golf’ and team game ‘ultimate Frisbee’.
Morrison, who died this month aged 90, said in 2007 that while the world had changed a lot in the past 50 years, the original purpose of Frisbee remained the same. “Just seeing the smile on a child’s face as he or she catches a soaring disc on a summer afternoon in the park, or a grown-up diving headfirst to grab a falling disc, that is what the spirit of Frisbee is all about.”
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