Flying Disc - History

History

Walter Frederick Morrison discovered a market for the modern-day flying disc in 1938 when he and future wife Lucile were offered US25 cents for a cake pan that they were tossing back and forth to each other on the beach in Santa Monica, California. "That got the wheels turning, because you could buy a cake pan for 5 cents, and if people on the beach were willing to pay a quarter for it, well, there was a business," Morrison told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2007. They continued their business until World War II, when he served in the Army Air Force, flying a P-47s and spent time as a prisoner of war. Returning from the war, Morrison sketched a design for an aerodynamically-improved flying disc that he called the Whirlo-Way. By 1948, after design modifications and experimentation with several prototypes, Morrison and business partner Warren Franscioni began producing the first plastic discs, renaming it the Flyin-Saucer in the wake of reported unidentified-flying-object sightings. "We worked fairs, demonstrating it", Morrison told the Virginian-Pilot. The two of them once overheard someone saying they used wires to make the discs hover like they were, so they used a sales pitch, "The flyin' saucer is free, but the invisible wire is $1". "That's where we learned we could sell these things, because people ate them up ." Morrison and Franscioni ended their partnership in 1950. Morrison formed his own company in 1953 called American Trends to sell a similar design and after further refinements in 1955, Morrison began producing a new disc, which he called the Pluto Platter. He sold the rights to Wham-O in 1956 and in 1958, Morrison was awarded U.S. Design Patent D183,626 for his flying disc.

In June 1957, Wham-O co-founder Richard Knerr decided to stimulate sales by giving the discs the additional brand name Frisbee (pronounced "friz'-bee"), after learning that Connecticut college students were calling the Pluto Platter by that name, the term "Frisbee" coming from the name of the Bridgeport, CT pie manufacturer Frisbie Pie Company. "I thought the name was a horror... terrible," Morrison told The Press-Enterprise of Riverside in 2007. In 1982, Morrison told Forbes magazine that he had received about US$2 million in royalty payments and said: "I wouldn't change the name of it for the world."

The man behind the Frisbee's phenomenal success, however, was Edward "Steady Ed" Headrick (Pasadena, Cal., June 28, 1924 — La Selva Beach, Cal., August 12, 2002), hired in 1964 as Wham-O's new general manager and vice president in charge of marketing. Headrick soon redesigned the Pluto Platter by reworking the rim thickness and top design, creating a more controllable disc that could be thrown accurately.

Sales skyrocketed for the toy, which was marketed as a new sport. In 1964, the first professional model went on sale. Headrick patented the new design, highlighting the "Rings of Headrick" and marketed and pushed the Professional Model Frisbee and "Frisbee" as a sport. (U.S. Patent 3,359,678).

Headrick, who became known as the father of disc sports, later founded The International Frisbee Association (IFA) and began establishing standards for various sports using the Frisbee such as Distance, Freestyle and Guts. Upon his death, Headrick was cremated, and, as requested by him, his ashes were molded into memorial Frisbees and given to family and close friends.