| Sometimes inventing something can be a | | | | soon made of plastic. The president of Wham-O |
| protracted affair. | | | | Company, Richard Knerr, noticed students at Yale |
| William Russell Frisbie founded the Frisbie Baking | | | | and Harvard were still tossing around the empty |
| Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1871. | | | | pie tins. He passed out plastic Wham-O Flyin' |
| Frisbie's pies came in tin pie plates with the name | | | | Saucers to the students. Hearing them refer |
| of the bakery on the bottom. It is unknown | | | | to the disks as Frisbies, and unaware of the |
| whether people of the day played with the | | | | Frisbie Baking Company, Knerr trademarked the |
| empty pie tins by sailing them through the air, but | | | | name Frisbee in 1959--the year after the Frisbie |
| by the 1940s, students at Yale--and possibly | | | | Baking Company closed down. |
| other colleges--were doing so. | | | | Thus, the Wham-O Frisbee. |
| In the 1950s, a decade that saw a spate of films | | | | In summary, Frisbie inadvertently invented a flying |
| about space aliens and flying saucers, Walter | | | | disk, Morrison was inspired to modify and |
| Frederick Morrison, a World War II vet who was | | | | promote it, and Knerr modified it further by |
| fascinated by flying saucers and the possibility of | | | | making it of plastic. Without Frisbie, Morrison |
| extraterrestrial beings, developed a toy flying disk | | | | would have had nothing to modify; without |
| of lightweight metal. Eventually the Wham-O | | | | Morrison, Knerr would have had no Frisbee name |
| Company of San Gabriel, California bought | | | | to trademark. |
| Morrison's idea. | | | | Sometimes two or three heads are better than |
| These "Flyin' Saucers," as they were called, were | | | | one. |