The Frisbee Salesmen Who Charged a Dollar for an Invisible Wire

What happened?

The man was Walter Frederick “Fred” Morrison, born in Richfield, Utah, on January 23, 1920. By his own account, it started in 1937 with a popcorn tin. He and his girlfriend Lucile Nay — later his wife — were tossing the lid back and forth at a family gathering. The lid dented. They switched to a cake pan, which flew better and cost about five cents at any store.

A year later, on a Santa Monica beach, a stranger offered them a quarter for the pan they were throwing. “That got the wheels turning,” Morrison told a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot in 2007, “because you could buy a cake pan for five cents, and if people on the beach were willing to pay a quarter for it, well — there was a business.” They started selling “Flyin’ Cake Pans” up and down the Los Angeles beaches.

The war interrupted. Morrison flew P-47 Thunderbolts over Italy, was shot down, and spent 48 days as a prisoner of war in Germany. Home again, he began sketching a disc that would fly better than a pan — a designed object rather than a repurposed kitchen tool. He called the first version the Whirlo-Way, after Whirlaway, the horse that took the Triple Crown in 1941.

In 1947 he met an investor named Warren Franscioni, and together they got the design molded in plastic. The country was in the middle of its first great flying-saucer panic, so they renamed the toy the Flyin-Saucer and took it on the fair circuit. That is where the invisible wire came in. Onlookers watching a disc bank and hover assumed a trick, so the pitch became, as Morrison recalled it: the Flyin-Saucer is free, but the invisible wire is one dollar. “We worked fairs, demonstrating it,” he said. “We learned we could sell these things.”

Selling them and making money at them turned out to be different problems. Sales disappointed, and the partners went their separate ways around 1950. Morrison kept refining. In 1955 he and Lucile designed the disc that actually worked: a deeper, aerodynamically cleaner shape with a raised dome on top and the names of the planets printed around the rim. They called it the Pluto Platter. Morrison filed a design patent for it on July 22, 1957; it issued the following year as U.S. Patent D183,626, “Flying toy.”

Wham-O — the Southern California company that would shortly unleash the Hula Hoop — took the rights in exchange for royalties, and the first discs came off the line on January 23, 1957.

Then came the naming problem. Within months, Wham-O heard that college students in the Northeast were already calling the thing a “frisbie,” apparently after the pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The company liked the sound of it, changed the spelling to Frisbee, and put it on the box. Morrison, who had spent twenty years developing the disc, reportedly thought the new name was terrible.

Why was it strange?

The tidy version of this story — students throw pie tins, toy company copies pie tins, Frisbee is born — is the one almost everyone knows, and it is the one part of the story with the least evidence behind it. Connecticut’s state humanities project describes the pie-tin game as “entertaining (but unproven).” Morrison himself insisted it had nothing to do with his invention; his memoir, co-written with Phil Kennedy, is blunt about it: it was a popcorn can lid, not a Frisbie pie tin.

So the object and the name have separate histories. A Utah-born fighter pilot spent two decades perfecting a molded plastic airfoil in California; a Bridgeport bakery, making pies since 1871 and shuttered the same year the disc launched, supplied the word. The two threads met only in a marketing meeting.

What did scientists learn?

A flying disc is a wing — a very short, very round one, with a curved upper surface and a hollow underside. Push it through the air fast enough and it generates lift, enough to roughly cancel its own weight at ordinary throwing speeds.

But lift alone would ruin it. The aerodynamic force acts ahead of the disc’s center, producing a pitching moment — a twisting force that tips the leading edge up. A disc thrown without spin flutters, stalls, and flips.

Spin is what rescues it. A spinning disc has angular momentum, and a twisting force applied to a spinning object doesn’t tip it the way it would tip a stationary one. Instead the object responds at right angles, a behavior called gyroscopic precession — the same reason a leaning bicycle wheel steers instead of falling. So the disc’s nose-up pitching moment gets converted into a slow roll to one side. That is why a Frisbee thrown flat and hard drifts and banks near the end of its flight instead of somersaulting.

Getting from “spin helps” to actual numbers took laboratory work. The most thorough study came from Jonathan Potts and William Crowther at the University of Manchester, who put flying discs in a wind tunnel in the early 2000s, measuring lift, drag, pitching moment, side force and rolling moment across a range of angles and spin rates, with smoke and surface-oil visualization to see what the air was actually doing. Their data fed a six-degree-of-freedom flight model — the same class of simulation used for aircraft.

How does it affect us today?

The disc you throw now is mostly not Morrison’s. In 1964 Wham-O hired designer Ed Headrick to run research and development, and he reworked the shape: he adjusted the rim mass and added a set of concentric raised ridges on the top surface, patented in 1967 as U.S. Patent 3,359,678. The patent argues the ridges trip the airflow into a turbulent, attached boundary layer that reduces drag; they also give a thrower’s fingers something to grip, which means more spin, which means more stability. Frisbee players call them the Rings of Headrick, and they are still on the disc.

Headrick also treated the disc as sports equipment rather than a novelty: he invented disc golf and installed the first standardized chain baskets, while high school students in Maplewood, New Jersey, invented Ultimate around the same time. Wham-O sold over 200 million Frisbees before the rights went to Mattel in 1994, and the Frisbee entered the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998.

Fun fact

The first Frisbees rolled off Wham-O’s line on January 23, 1957 — Fred Morrison’s thirty-seventh birthday.

Sources

• U.S. Design Patent D183,626, “Flying toy,” W. F. Morrison (filed July 22, 1957; issued September 30, 1958) — the Pluto Platter design, in Morrison’s own filing
• U.S. Patent 3,359,678, “Flying saucer,” E. E. Headrick (filed November 1, 1965; issued December 26, 1967) — the ridged design still in production
• J. R. Potts and W. J. Crowther, “Frisbee Aerodynamics” / “Aerodynamic Performance of Flying Discs,” University of Manchester — wind-tunnel measurements and flight simulation
• Smithsonian Magazine, “An American Toy Company Produced the World’s First Frisbees… on This Day in 1957”
• Connecticut History (CT Humanities), “A Pie Tin’s Soaring Sales” — on the Frisbie Pie Company and why the pie-tin origin is unproven

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