Walter Fredrick Morrison, who at 17 sent the lid of a popcorn tin skimming through the air of a California backyard and as an adult remade the lid in plastic, in the process inventing the simple, elegant flying disc known today as the Frisbee, died Tuesday at his home in Monroe, Utah.
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Wham-O changed the name to Frisbee in 1958, influenced by the Frisbie Pie Company in Connecticut, whose tins Yale students hurled for sport.
“I thought the name was a horror,” he told The Press Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., in 2007. “Terrible.” (Before perfecting the Pluto Platter in 1955, Mr. Morrison had called earlier incarnations of his disc the Flyin’ Cake Pan, the Whirlo-Way and the Flyin-Saucer.)
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In 1948, he and a partner, Warren Franscioni, manufactured the Flyin-Saucer, the first plastic flying disc. It sold fitfully, and the two men parted company in 1950. The Pluto Platter was Mr. Morrison’s most refined disc. Flat and round, it had a raised central hub, with the names of the planets in raised plastic around the rim. The instructions, molded into the underside, were written by Lu Morrison and read like a Zen koan:
Play catch — Invent Games
To Fly, Flip Away Backhanded
Flat Flip Flies Straight
Tilted Flip Curves — Experiment!
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