Flying Discs 1: The Frisbee
Exactly when it started is not recorded, but it was certainly some time before World War II that Yale students began to amuse themselves by throwing pie tins back and forth. Most of the tins had once contained pies made by the Frisbie Pie Company; in fact, most of them were embossed with the words "Frisbie's Pies."
Walter Frederick Morrison didn't go to Yale but, as a boy in Utah, he sailed paint can covers and cookie tin tops, though not pie tins. After flying 58 missions as a fighter pilot in World War, he was shot down, and finally came home after being liberated from a German prisoner-of-war camp.
In 1947, Morrison met another former pilot, Warren Franscioni, who had just started a bottle gas business with a partner in San Luis Obispo, California. Morrison got a job with the new company.
With business slack, Franscioni and Morrison talked about how they could make some extra money. Evidently quite a few Californians were throwing metal pie tins around in those years, because the idea of creating a plastic replacement for the metal pie tin came up.
Their 1948 prototype was shaped on a lathe out of Tenite, a very hard cellulosic plastic that has commonly been used for making telephones and toothbrushes, among other things.
The phrase "flying saucer" had been in the news for a year or so, as people reported seeing disc-shaped things flying around, culminating in the supposed crash of one near Roswell, New Mexico, in June of 1947.
Franscioni and Morrison originally called their toy the "Whirlo Way" but then changed that to "Flyin Saucer" (with no apostrophe). They started a company, Partners in Plastic (Pipco) and began producing injection-molded Flyin Saucers, priced at $1 apiece.
The partners soon realized that the best way to sell the product was to demonstrate it in action. Morrison became the primary demonstrator while Franscioni handled sales and did the bookkeeping.
Disneyland and Woolworth's were the first major outlets. In 1950, cartoonist Al Capp agreed to include the Flyin Saucer in his "Li'l Abner" comic strip. When Franscioni and Morrison packaged inserts of the comic strip with the product, Capp demanded an additional $5,000. Franscioni borrowed the money to make the payoff, but that was essentially the end of Pipco.
Within a short time, Franscioni was back in the Air Force, while Morrison moved to Los Angeles and got a job as a building inspector. But the Southern California Plastic Company kept producing flying discs and Morrison sold them in his spare time.
Meanwhile, Morrison also came up with a new design that he called the "Pluto Platter." The Flyin Saucer had six vanes on top, supposedly to improve lift, though they had no such effect. For the Pluto Platter, Morrison removed the vanes. He also changed materials. Flyin Saucers were made of butyrate, a very hard plastic that shatters easily when it's cool. The Pluto Platter was molded of polyethylene, which is much softer and more flexible. Morrison foundeded a new company, American Trends, to market the improved disc.
Rich Knerr and Spud Melin saw Morrison demonstrating the Pluto Platter in 1956. The pair owned a company called Wham-O that made wooden slingshots. They decided the Pluto Platter would be a good way to double the company's product line. After signing a contract with Morrison, Wham-O began producing the flying discs in January of 1957.
Knerr went east in 1958 to sell the product on college campuses. During a visit to Yale, he saw students throwing Frisbie pie tins around. When he returned to California, Wham-O renamed its flying disc the Frisbee and registered the name as a trademark in 1959. (Ironically, the Frisbie Pie Company went out of business in 1958.)
The new name didn't make much of a dent in the public consciousness until 1964, when Ed Headrick joined Wham-O to take over research and development. One of his first moves was to redesign the Frisbee. Called the Professional Model Frisbee, the new design had narrow grooves around the outer edge. Those grooves are now known as "the lines of Headrick."
Headrick's contributions went far beyond that relatively simple design, for which he received U. S. Patent 3359678. In 1967, he organized the International Frisbee Association (IFA) in Los Angeles; the following year, the IFA held its first Masters Tournament in the Rose Bowl. Headrick invented a new sport, Frisbee golf, in 1969. It was one of four events at the IFA's Berkeley vs. Southern California Meet that year in Pasadena's Brookside Park.
Meanwhile, two team sports had been developed for Frisbees. Guts was first played at Dartmouth College in 1954 and it was an event at the 1958 Invitational Frisbee Tournament in Escanaba, Michigan. Ultimate Frisbee was invented in 1967 by Joel Silver and friends at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. The first intercollegiate game of ultimate was played between Rutgers and Princeton on November 6, 1972--the 103rd anniversary of the first intercollegiate football (actually soccer) game between the same two schools.