The Frisbee Began as a Pie Tin, a Flying-Saucer Hoax, and a Man Selling Discs in a Costume

US3359678 was granted to Walter Frederick Morrison on December 26, 1967. The title is "Flying Saucer." Morrison had been throwing, refining, and selling flying discs for twenty years by then, and the object had already passed through several names, one hoax, and a costume.

The origin, by Morrison's own repeated telling, was a cake pan. In 1937, on a beach in Los Angeles, he and his future wife Lucile were tossing a popcorn-can lid, which dented, and then a cake pan, which flew better. A stranger offered them a quarter for the pan — which had cost five cents — and Morrison noticed that there was money in throwing things.

He flew fighters in the Second World War and was shot down and held as a prisoner of war; he later said his understanding of airfoils and lift came in part from that flying. After the war he sketched a disc he called the Whirlo-Way.

Riding the saucer craze

In 1947 the Kenneth Arnold sighting and then the Roswell incident set off the American flying-saucer panic. Morrison, alert to a marketing opportunity, renamed his disc the Flyin-Saucer. He and a partner produced them and sold them at county fairs and beaches around southern California.

The sales technique was pure carnival. Morrison would set up with a partner some distance away and offer the discs with the line that he was actually selling an invisible wire — a hundred feet of it for a dollar — and the disc came free with the wire. The pitch was a joke everyone was in on, and it drew a crowd, which was the point. He sometimes worked in a costume befitting the saucer theme.

In 1955 he designed a better disc, with a more refined aerodynamic profile, and called it the Pluto Platter — again leaning on the space enthusiasm of the era. This is the design that underlies the modern Frisbee, and the shape described in his patent: a curved lip and domed top that generate stable lift while the spin provides gyroscopic stability.

Wham-O renames it

In 1957 Morrison sold the rights to the toy company Wham-O. The company's founders, Rich Knerr and Arthur Melin, discovered that college students in the northeast had for years been throwing empty pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, shouting "Frisbie!" as a warning to anyone in the flight path.

Wham-O adopted the name, respelling it Frisbee, and Morrison — by his own account — thought the new name was terrible.

He was, he later admitted with good humor, completely wrong. The Frisbee became one of the best-selling toys in history, with sales estimated in the hundreds of millions of units. Morrison's royalties, by his own statement, ran to more than a million dollars.

Whole sports grew out of it: Ultimate, disc golf, freestyle, and the entire canine-disc world. It has been used to study aerodynamics and thrown on the Moon's behalf in countless schoolyards.

The object is essentially a well-tuned cake pan. The name honors a pie company that had nothing to do with it. And the man who patented it made his first sales pretending to sell an invisible wire.

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The full text and figures of US3359678 are on patents.us.