By James F. Cotter

An Eclectic Evolution

Sometimes inventing something can be a protracted affair. 

William Russell Frisbie founded the Frisbie Baking  Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut  in 1871.  Frisbie’s pies came in tin pie plates with the name of the bakery on the bottom.  It is unknown whether people of the day played with the empty pie tins by sailing them through the air, but by the 1940s, students at Yale—and possibly other colleges—were doing so. 

In the 1950s, a decade that saw a spate of films about space aliens and flying saucers, Walter Frederick Morrison, a World War II vet who was fascinated by flying saucers and the possibility of extraterrestrial beings, developed a toy flying disk of lightweight metal.  Eventually the Wham-O Company of San Gabriel, California bought Morrison’s idea.

These “Flyin’ Saucers,” as they were called, were soon made of plastic.  The president of Wham-O Company, Richard Knerr, noticed students at Yale and Harvard were still tossing around the empty pie tins.  He passed out plastic Wham-O  Flyin’ Saucers to the students.  Hearing  them  refer to the disks as Frisbies, and unaware of the Frisbie Baking Company, Knerr trademarked the name Frisbee in 1959—the year after the Frisbie Baking Company closed down.

Thus, the Wham-O Frisbee.

In summary, Frisbie inadvertently invented a flying disk, Morrison was inspired to modify and promote it, and Knerr modified it further by making it of plastic.  Without Frisbie, Morrison would have had nothing to modify; without Morrison, Knerr would have had no Frisbee name to trademark.

Sometimes two or three heads are better than one.   

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