After two years of success selling at fairs, Morrison and Nay caught the attention of the Wham-O company. And on January 23, 1957, they came to an agreement with Wham-O to give the corporation full manufacturing and sales control in exchange for royalties, according to The History of the Frisbee. That May, one of the owners of Wham-O, Rich Knerr, read an article in Sport Illustrated about flying discs, which noted, “Nobody at Princeton seems to know who named the Frisbee, or why.”
In fact, the name came from the Frisbie Pie Company, which made pies in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Workers at the pie company spent their breaks throwing pie tins back and forth, as did college students in the Northeast. According to Atlas Obscura, Yale University was a major customer. The pie tins had the name “Frisbie” embossed on them, and one of the legends about the origin of the name claims that students would yell “Frisbie!” to get the attention of those standing in the way of a flying pie tin.
After reading the article, Knerr knew he could capitalize on the Frisbie name. And by spelling the disc’s name with an E instead of an I, he avoided any lawsuits. By summer 1957, Frisbees were renamed and in 1958, Morrison got a patent for his Frisbee. And although Time Magazine reports that Morrison thought the name Frisbee was horrible, he “stopped complaining after sales began to soar.”
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