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The Virginian-Pilot
Of all the toys in all the world, it is the acme of elegant simplicity, an idea refined to near perfection, a testament to the wonders of plastic.
It has outlasted every fad. It has outsold all but the oldest and most basic of playthings - the ball - and has outsold most types of those. It is cheap, portable and adaptable. It appeals to all ages, on every continent, in city and suburb and country, in white collar and blue.
It is nearly indestructible. It has no moving parts, won't crack or shatter, is impervious to decay. Run over it with the car, and it's ready to use. Leave it under a bush or forgotten on a roof, and a decade later it's as good as new.
And it's been around for 50 years.
A half century ago this year, a California carpenter named Walter Frederick Morrison married the advantages of injection-molded plastic to the disk, a shape that had fascinated and amused man for thousands of years, to create what the world knows now as the Frisbee.
He happened to do it at the height of America's fixation on flying saucers.
And launched a space-age craze that never died.
The world's greatest toy was born, suitably enough, in a backyard - a Southern California backyard in which the 17-year-old Morrison and his high school sweetheart, Lucile Nay, were passing time during a Thanksgiving Day party at Lucile's house in 1937. A big tin of popcorn was on hand. Fred and Lu took to tossing its lid.
When flicked through the air rightside-up, the lid's smooth top side offered little resistance to the air passing over it, while its downturned edge created a baffle slowing the air passing beneath. The result: lift.
Stabilized by the spin imparted by a backhanded throw, the lid not only flew but also answered simple commands - depending on its angle when it left the hand, it would glide flat, curve or boomerang.
"When it got banged up, we switched to cake pans," the 87-year-old Morrison recalled last week. "Actually, the pans flew better than the popcorn lid." One day in 1938 he and Lu were playing catch beside the ocean when up walked a beach bum. He offered them a quarter for their cake pan.
"That got the wheels turning," Morrison said, "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."
So the couple took to selling cake pans at Santa Monica. They kept doing it after marrying in 1939, right up to World War II and Morrison's departure for Europe. He learned a lot in his stint in the U.S. Army Air Force about aerodynamics, combat tactics and - on March 19, 1945 - the vulnerabilities of a P-47 Thunderbolt under heavy ground fire: Morrison was shot down on a strafing run over Italy's Po Valley. He spent 48 days in a Nazi Luftstalag.
Back home, he joined the carpenters union. He and Lu moved to San Luis Obispo, where for a while they lived in a tent. By day he wielded a hammer, but after hours he drifted back to his prewar hobby. He sketched a design for a flying disk toy, an aerodynamic refinement of the metal cake pan. He had a draftsman reproduce the drawing in more formal style.
With those 1946 plans, the world had its first glimpse of what would become the Frisbee.
The following year, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was in the air near Washington state's Mount Rainier when he saw nine bright objects - eight of them circular, one crescent-shaped and all seemingly metallic - streaking south along the Cascades Range. Arnold reported they weaved among the peaks, porpoising "like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water."
Morrison was ready when newspaper accounts of the incident sparked a national UFO craze that summer of 1947. With the financial backing of a partner, Warren Franscioni, he modified his drawings and after experimenting with several prototypes, in 1948 produced the Flyin-Saucer, the first plastic flying disk.
"We worked fairs, demonstrating it," he said. "That's where we learned we could sell these things, because people ate them up.
"We gave people space licenses with every sale. One of our gimmicks was pretending we were flying these things on an invisible wire. We'd sell people this invisible wire in 100-foot rolls and give them the disk for free."
He was joined, most often, by Lu, who Morrison said was more the toy's co-inventor than anyone. Some dispute that, say that Franscioni was cut out of the credit for a mutual invention, but such talk is dismissed by Phil Kennedy, Morrison's co-author on "Flat Flip Flies Straight: True Origins of the Frisbee," a book published last year. "Fred came up with the design a year before he met Franscioni," he said.
In any event, the partners split in 1950. Over the next few years, Morrison fiddled with the Flyin-Saucer's design, especially its outer edge. The existing disk sloped to a shallow, vertical rim; his new drawings made the edge more bull-nosed, had it curve back in on itself. In cross-section, it formed the leading edge of a wing.
"A lot of it was intuitive," Kennedy said. "Because of his aviation experience, he knew what made a wing fly, and he applied that knowledge."
Prototypes confirmed that "it flew so much better than the Flyin-Saucer," Morrison said. It also fit the hand more naturally, rolled off the index finger, hovered rock-steady. "There's a little more mass in the rim," he explained. "It's a little deeper."
In 1955, Morrison took the new design into production as the Pluto Platter. It featured a small dome at its center, a circle of portholes stamped into its plastic, and the names of the planets around its rim.
Most memorably, its underside bore simple instructions, penned by Lu, that offer a clue to the toy's enduring appeal: "Play Catch," they read. "Invent Games."
All this time, Morrison still worked full time as a carpenter. On weekends he and Lu would hit county fairs and flea markets, demonstrating the Pluto Platter, selling a bunch. Soon enough, though, he saw that to reach its full potential, his invention needed help.
So in December 1956, Morrison contacted an energetic toy outfit based in the L.A. suburbs, the Wham-O Manufacturing Co. Any American kid of the late 1950s through early 1970s is well-acquainted with the company's products, which included the Water Wiggle and Slip 'N Slide, the Hula Hoop and Monster Magnet, the crazily bouncy Superball. The Hacky Sack? That was Wham-O's, too.
None was bigger than the simple, resilient toy that Walter Frederick Morrison presented to company founders Arthur "Spud" Melin and Richard Knerr. Within a month, they'd contracted for the rights to the Pluto Platter. Before long, it was nationwide.
"I bought my first Pluto Platter probably in April of 1957," recalled Kennedy, who today has a collection of more than 1,000 disks. "I walked into a five-and-ten and there it was, just sitting there. It wasn't even in packaging."
On an East Coast trip to market the toy, Melin and Knerr heard youngsters call tossing the Platter "Frisbie-ing" - and discovered it was a reference to the Frisbie Pie Co. of Bridgeport, Conn., the pans of which had long been popular for games of catch throughout New England, especially at Yale. In 1958, Wham-O added its own name and a misspelled "Frisbee" to the Pluto Platter.
Not surprisingly, a good many folks figure the Frisbee descended directly from the pie tin - Web sites galore repeat the myth, along with others (that Morrison was imprisoned at Stalag 13, for instance, or that his father invented the sealed-beam headlight, or that the first Flyin-Saucer prototype was carved out of a block of plastic, when it was really turned on a lathe).
The Frisbee's debt to the pie tin begins and ends with the name. "I've never seen a Frisbie plate," Morrison said. "Seen pictures of them, but have never seen the real thing."
Morrison would earn seven-figure royalties from his invention. Even so, he kept his day job: He stuck with carpentry until 1961, when he became a Los Angeles building inspector. He did that for seven years.
In the meantime, a Wham-O employee named Ed Headrick designed a "sport model" of Morrison's disk, minus the portholes and planet names and decorated with a band of concentric ridges right about where one's thumb rests in a backhand throw. The so-called "Rings of Headrick" have been credited with improving the Frisbee's airborne manners.
"There's a lot of controversy on that," Kennedy said. "I don't know if they did any wind-tunnel testing to determine whether there was a change, or any improvement in its aerodynamics."
Morrison has his doubts. "These are all design changes," he said. "None of them are mechanical. What they had done was take a childish-looking Pluto Platter and Headrick modernized it - gave it a more adult look, thank heaven."
The Pluto Platter was retired with Headrick's 1964 alterations. When Headrick died in 2002, a good many newspapers labeled him the Frisbee's inventor - an impression that was bolstered by his request that his ashes be molded into commemorative disks, which can still be had at amazon.com for $200 a pair.
As for the Platter, it became a rarity. The equipment that had produced it disappeared. When Wham-O decided to reissue Morrison's disk for this year's anniversary, it had to use a clean original from Kennedy's collection to reverse-engineer new molds.
For now, the "Limited Edition Inventors Model" is selling alongside Wham-O's pro, sport and lighter kids' Frisbees.
Morrison was pulled out of retirement, too, for a photo session on a California beach not far from where he once flipped cake pans. "He can still whip it pretty good, I'd say," said Dave Waisblum, Wham-O's Frisbee product manager. "He was probably 50, 60 feet away, on the beach, and we challenged him to hit the camera. He came very close."
During the session, Waisblum said, he taught Morrison the forehand flip, one of the tricks that separate serious players from the masses.
The Frisbee's inventor had never quite gotten it down.
• Reach Earl Swift at 446-2352 orearl.swift@pilotonline.com
