On January 23, 1957, machines from toy company Wham-O rolled out the first batch of their plastic aero discs, now known to millions of fans around the world as Frisbees.
The Frisbee story began in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where William Frisbie started the Frisbie Pie Company in 1871. Students at nearby universities were throwing empty pie tins at each other, shouting “Frisbie! as they let go. In 1948 Walter Frederick Morrison and his partner Warren Franscioni invented a plastic version of the disc called the “flying saucer” that could fly further and more accurately than pewter pie plates. After parting ways with Franscioni, Morrison made an improved model in 1955 and sold it to the new toy company Wham-O under the name “Pluto Platter” – an attempt to cash in on the public craze for space. and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
In 1958, a year after the toy was first released, Wham-O – the company behind best-selling books such as the Hula-Hoop, Super Ball, and Water Wiggle – changed its name to the Frisbee Disc. , misspelling the name of the historic pie company. A company designer, Ed Headrick, patented the design of the modern Frisbee in December 1967, adding a band of raised ridges to the surface of the disc – called the rings – to stabilize the flight. Aggressively marketing the game of frisbee as a new sport, Wham-O sold over 100 million units of his famous toy in 1977.
High school students in Maplewood, New Jersey, invented the Ultimate Frisbee, a cross between football, soccer and basketball, in 1967. In the 1970s, Headrick himself invented Frisbee Golf, in which discs are thrown into metal baskets; there are now hundreds of courses in the United States, with millions of followers. There’s also Freestyle Frisbee, with choreographed routines to music and multiple in-game discs, and various Frisbee competitions for humans and dogs – the best natural Frisbee players.
Today, at least 60 manufacturers produce the flying discs – usually plastic and measuring around 20-25 centimeters (8-10 inches) in diameter with a curved lip. The official Frisbee is owned by Mattel Toy Manufacturers, who purchased the toy from Wham-O in 1994.
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