A rubbish idea?

William moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1871 to start a new job managing a bakery, a branch of the Olds Baking Company of New Haven. The bakery was a great success and William went on to buy it outright. He established the Frisbie Pie Company and was soon selling his pies all over New England
William died in 1903 but his son, Joseph,  took over and manned the ovens until his death in 1940. Under his direction the small company grew and shops were opened in Hartford, Connecticut; Poughkeepsie, New York; and Providence, Rhode Island.
 
Each pie came in a lightweight tin and, while no-one knows who actually threw the first dish, throwing empty Frisbie tins soon caught on, especially amongst the students at Yale and other local colleges. It was here that the distinctive spinning throws were developed. The loud cry of "Frisbie!", the equivalent of golf's "Fore!" was heard first in New England but later all across America.

In 1948 Fred Morrison, a Californian buildings' inspector and part-time inventor, had an idea; why bother with the pie, why not just manufacture and sell discs shaped like the empty pie tins? He experimented with welding a steel ring inside the rim to improve the tin's stability, but without success. He then tried moulding a similar shape out of plastic with much more success. He called his invention The Flyin’ Saucer, tapping into the craze for UFOs and space travel in general.
 

(Morrison with The Pluto Platter)

Rich Knerr and A.K."Spud" Melin, newly graduated from the University of Southern California, were making slingshots in their fledgling toy company when they first saw Morrison's Flyin’ Saucers whizzing around southern California beaches. So, in late 1955, they cornered Morrison while he was selling his Frisbees on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles and invited him to their San Gabriel factory where they asked him to join them at the wonderfully named Wham-O toy company. Production started in 1957 and the improved flying saucers were renamed - Pluto Platters.
 
Sometime later, on a trip to the campuses of the Ivy League, Knerr first heard the term "Frisbie." Enquiring about it he discovered that the students had been tossing pie tins about for years, and called it Frisbie-ing. Knerr liked the terms Frisbie and Frisbie-ing – though Morrison at first was resistant, "I thought the name was a horror. Terrible!" - but Kerr prevailed. Having no idea of the historical origins, Knerr spelled the saucer "Frisbee", phonetically correct but one vowel away from the Frisbie Pie Company.
 
By 1982 Morrison had changed his mind and, as he told Forbes magazine, now that he had received about US $2 million in royalty payments, "I wouldn't change the name of it for the world”.

It is estimated that sales of Frisbees are now greater than the combined sales of baseballs, basketballs and footballs.

Not bad for what was originally just a piece of rubbish.

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