The Frisbee Is Named After a Pie Company
The popular story, checked against the evidence.
The Real Story
- Popular claim
- The Frisbee is named after empty pie tins students used to throw.
- Verdict
- True
- The record
- Students tossed Frisbie Pie Company tins; Wham-O renamed its plastic flying disc 'Frisbee' after the game.
The Frisbee has an origin that sounds too neat to be true — a flying toy named after a pie company — and yet, unusually, it checks out. The plastic disc came from one inventor; the beloved name came from a New England bakery and a college craze.
The pie tins
The Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, sold pies in light metal tins — and those tins, it turned out, flew beautifully. College students in the region, at Yale and elsewhere, took to sailing the empty tins to one another across lawns and quads, reportedly shouting “Frisbie!” as a warning to duck. It was a genuine campus pastime, built on nothing more than the aerodynamics of a leftover pie plate.
The plastic disc
Separately, a Californian named Walter Frederick Morrison had been tinkering with flying discs, developing a plastic version he marketed under space-age names during the flying-saucer craze — the “Pluto Platter” among them. In the late 1950s the toy company Wham-O acquired his design. Learning of the East Coast pie-tin game and its catchy cry, Wham-O adopted the name — respelling “Frisbie” as “Frisbee” — for the plastic disc. The engineered toy and the folk name met and merged.
The result was one of the twentieth century’s enduring toys, whose name honours not its inventor but the bakery whose tins first taught people the joy of a spinning disc in flight.
The verdict
True. The Frisbee really is named, by way of Wham-O’s marketing, after the Frisbie Pie Company whose tins students threw for fun. It sits comfortably beside the other happy accidents in the true stories behind famous toys and mascots — see also the Slinky.
Sources
- “Frisbee,” Wikipedia.
- Histories of the Frisbie Pie Company and Wham-O.
