The History of the Frisbee

The Flying Disk toy that we call a Frisbee is said to have originiated sometime between 1871 and 1958 from the empty pie tins of the Frisbie Baking Company in Bridgeport Connecticut. College students would spend countless hours tossing the empty pie tins back and forth after eating the pies from the local bakery. In 1870 William Russel Frisbie came up with a clever marketing idea for his bakery. He put the families name in relief on the bottom of the reusable tin pie pans. This would allow people to see the Frisbie Pie name everytime the pie pan was re-used and hopefully increase return business to the bakery.

A decade later, out in California, a flying-saucer enthusiast named Walter Frederick Morrison designed a saucer-like plastic disk for playing catch. Morrison called it the Plutto Platter to cash in on the growing popularity of UFO's in the USA. Morrison sold the rights to the Wham-O company and they began production in 1957. A year later Fred Morrison was awarded a patent (Design patent 183,626) for his flying disk. This same year Wham-O renamed the Plutto Platter to it's more traditional grass roots name of "Frisbee". Notice the slight change in spelling from Frisbie to Frisbee to avoid legal issues.

Today the fifty year old Frisbee® is owned by Mattel Toy Manufacturers, only one of at least sixty manufacturers of flying discs. Wham-O sold over one hundred million units before the selling the toy to Mattel.