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Do you like playing Frisbee, perhaps at the beach or with your dog? It’s a really fun game, and people take it very seriously. But do you know where the Frisbee originated from? It’s a pretty interesting story, so read on.

In 1871, William Russell Frisbie bought a bakery and named it the Frisbie Pie Company. After he died, the bakery stayed open using the original name. This bakery just happened to be near a college campus that is now Yale. The students there would go to buy pies as a tasty treat, and then use the pie tins to toss around campus. On the bottom of these tins was the Frisbie stamp, and students were heard around campus yelling Frisbie to the person that was about to catch it.

In 1948, a man named Walter Frederick Morrison had a vision of producing plastic flying discs to enhance the fascination people had at the time with UFO’s. He believed that this new toy would be a big hit. Boy, was he right! After getting enough money together to build a mold for his discs, he began producing some. The first model he called the Rotary Fingernail Clipper, and the second model he called the Pluto Platter, which he sold at county fairs. But his success came when in 1957, the Wham-O Company approached him about mass-producing these plastic discs. The discs didn’t sell as well as Wham-O had expected and they stopped producing them. But, in 1958, the frisbie pie factory shut down and Morrison was given the patent to the flying disc. Wham-O was still interested in selling them, but wanted a catchy name. In 1959, they decided they liked the name Frisbie, but when they registered it as a trademark, they miss-spelled it as Frisbee. So, that’s where that fun round plastic disc that we all know and love came from!