Pie In The Sky
Author:
Jeff Little
Look! Up in the sky!
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a round piece of
plastic that filled the skies for years through the
fifties and sixties and still floats around today.
Yes, it's the
Frisbee. And, over the years, people have
purchased over 200 million of them.
Wham-O (a company
founded on the manufacturing of wooden slingshots)
first sold the flying disc called Frisbee in
1958, but it had been around for years before with
different names, shapes and colors. So why call it
Frisbee?
Apparently,
The Frisbie Baking
Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut was
responsible for the unusual name attached to the
circular projectile that would years later become
all the rage. More to the point, their pie plates
(and a supposed spelling error) allowed Wham-O its
titling "spin-off."
New England college
students had been tossing and catching the
baker's empty pie tins for years. And, like
yelling, "Fore!" while golfing, the disc hurlers
would shout, "Frisbie!" to give passersby a heads-up
By 1947, Ivy
League baked goods aficionados weren't the
only ones who were "pie-eyed" for flying platters.
Walter Frederick Morrison and Warren Franscioni
(both World War II U.S. Army Air Corps pilots)
teamed-up in 1947 and formulated a plan.
Kids had been
playing catch with pie pans and other similar
projectiles throughout history, but the various
items used for such activities presented many
problems. Most available objects would chip,
break, warp, or become jagged over time. But
Morrison and Franscioni knew of a substance that
would not: plastic. And, coincidentally, while the
two concocted their plan, a seemingly unrelated
event occurred.
In early July,
1947, near a small town called Roswell, New
Mexico, there was an alleged alien spaceship
crash. And before you could say, "little green
men," stories, distortions of facts, and other
"sightings" had the world convinced that UFO's
were shaped like "flying saucers."
Not to miss out on
the craze, Morrison and Franscioni, in 1948,
made their move. They developed their new toy and
called it the "Flyin' Saucer." But the item never
became quite as popular as the former
pilots had hoped. Even when Morrison struck-out on
his own and re-named their invention the "Pluto
Platter," sales never seemed to "take-off."
Then in 1955,
while demonstrating his wares in a Los Angeles
parking lot, Morrison met
Rich Knerr and Arthur
"Spud" Melin, founders of Wham-O (the makers of
the "Hula-Hoop").
A deal
was made and Wham-O was in the "Pluto Platter"
business.
Then, while
touring East Coast colleges to drum-up
interest in their new product, Knerr noticed Yale
students (still throwing pie tins) shouting,
"Frisbie!" And thus the name of the "Pluto
Platter" was changed to a trademark that has
become as generic in human speech as "Coke" or
"Kleenex."
Sales of the
"Frisbee" were moderate in the fifties but
boomed in the sixties and millions of units were
sold.
The "Frisbee"
has become a worldwide icon and proven to
everyone that if you partner with a bakery you
can make a lot of dough.
