The Frisbee Took Its Name From a Bakery's Pie Tins

Picture a sunny afternoon on a green lawn in New England, around a hundred years ago. Someone has just finished a pie. Instead of taking the empty tin back, they flick it sideways, and it sails across the grass, wobbling and glinting in the sun, while a friend runs to catch it. According to a much-loved story, that is how the Frisbee got its name.

The tins came from the Frisbie Pie Company, which William Frisbie opened in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1871. The bakery grew into a big business, and by 1956 it was making 80,000 pies a day. Its pies came in tins that carried a small deposit, so an empty tin was worth hanging on to, and there were a great many of them around.

The story goes that people soon discovered an empty pie tin, thrown the right way, flies surprisingly well. The New England Historical Society describes Yale students throwing the tins upside down on the New Haven Green in the 1920s, with a shout of Frisbie as a warning to anyone standing in the way. According to the Flying Disc Museum, pie tins were not the only things in the air: cookie can covers and paint can lids got the same treatment, and the pastime became known as Frisbieing.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the flying disc was being reinvented in plastic. Around 1946, Walter Morrison and Warren Franscioni made a plastic flying disc in a basement in California. In 1947, with the whole country talking about flying saucers, they renamed it the Flyin' Saucer. Morrison later patented a design he called the Pluto Platter and showed it to the founders of Wham-O, a toy company, who agreed to make it.

Here the two stories meet. The toy makers heard that on the East Coast people called flying discs Frisbies, after the pie tins. They liked the name, changed the spelling to Frisbee, and in the late 1950s it went onto their disc. By coincidence, the bakery closed at about the same time, after more than 80 years of pies. Later discs gained raised rings on top for steadier flight, and according to Connecticut History, people bought more than 200 million Frisbees from Wham-O before the rights to the toy were sold in 1994.

So how much of this do we actually know? The bakery, its founding in 1871 and its tins are well documented, and so is the disc's journey from a California basement to a toy factory. The charming middle part is shakier. Connecticut History, a project of the state's humanities council, calls the tale of students throwing pie tins and calling out Frisbie entertaining but unproven, and the accounts differ over who did the throwing: Yale students, local schoolchildren or the bakery's own workers.

What the sources do agree on is where the name came from. Whoever sent the first tin spinning across the grass, the word printed on many millions of plastic discs is a slightly respelled bakery name from Bridgeport, which means that every game of catch in a park still carries, very faintly, the memory of a pie.