ELEPHANT DIAPHRAGMS

 

I want to begin by stating the facts. Frisbie's started baking pies commercially in 1924. When Joe Frisbie died in 1940, his widow, Marina, inherited the family bakery. She ran the ovens on Kossuth Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut for another 18 years, baking up to 80,000 pies a day.  As was the industry standard, each of the tin pie plates was stamped with the company name, and carried a 5 cent deposit -  to be repaid for every pie tin returned. And it turns out the profit was really in the tins.

By 1958 the deposit had risen to 10 cents and advancing age induced Marina to sell her business to the  competition, Table Talk Pies out of Worcester, Massachusetts (above). Table Talk was not interested in supporting the  competition and Frisbie's Pies ceased to exist.  In the 1960's Table Talk was sold to baby food maker "Beach Nut", which 2 years later, closed Table Talk entirely.  But Table Talk came out of bankruptcy in 1986, thanks to Mister Christo Cocaine. Today their 300 employees are still baking some 250 million little pies ever year.  Those are the facts. Now, somehow, despite those facts, the legend has been perpetrated that Bridgeport students at Yale University began throwing pie tins, and thus invented the Frisbee.

The first problem with this legend is that Yale University is not in Bridgeport. Yale is in New Haven, which is 20 miles further to the north. And that is a very long way to throw a Frisbee. There are other problems with the legend, all of which give me the feeling that the Yale alumni were throwing something around besides pie plates. But despite these facts, an original Frisbie Pie tin still sells on Ebay for about $25 – a 25,000% increase in value, primarily because of its mythical connection to a plastic toy. In truth, the non-immaculate conception of the Frisbee is a much more interesting story than the myth.

According to the tale as related by Fred Morrison (above, right)  to writer Ben Van Heuvelen, back in 1937,  the then 17 year old Fred and his girl friend and later fiancé Lucile Nay (above, left)  were in her back yard tossing around the lid from a can of popcorn, because they didn’t have a football. The lid’s flight was horribly erratic, and the teenagers made a game of trying to predict which direction the lid would take on each toss. Over the California winter, the pair began playing the game with various lids and plates, and discovered that pie tins produced the best "spin”.  The following  spring , while they were throwing a 5 cent pie tin around on the beach, a man approached Fred and asked where he could buy the toy. Fred immediately sold him the lid for a quarter – a 500% profit.

Having been slapped in the face by opportunity, the couple bought pie tins in bulk from a local hardware store and every weekend took them to the beach where they tossed the tins back and forth, to attract a crowd. The resultant sales did not make the Morrison's rich, but this was still the depression, and every quarter helped. Then World War Two changed the world.

Because of the post war housing shortage 1946 found the couple living in an Army surplus tent on Camp San Luis Obispo.  Fred was pouring concrete slabs for home fuel tanks, and Lucy was working at a Lockheed plant. But Fred couldn’t get the profitable spinning pie plate idea out of his head, and eventually mentioned it to his boss, Warren Franscioni.  During the war both Warren and Fred had been pilots, and Warren, like Fred, also saw the potential in the spinning pie plates.  But, it seems that unlike Fred, Warren had been paying attention in ground school, and was familiar with the work of Daniel Bernoulli.

Now I remember Daniel because his father, Johann Bernouli, was the biggest heel in the history of mathematics. At one point, father and son tied for a first prize in physics. Johann was so consumed by jealousy that he kicked Daniel out of the house. Johann then waited until Daniel published the work he had won the prize for, and then Johann rewrote the same material, backdating it, so it looked like the son had stolen from the father. What a heel. Father and son never spoke again.

Of course what most people remember about Daniel Bernouli is that before he was 30 he had laid out the mathematics of flight, two hundred years before they would be put to use; one half the pressure of a fluid, times the velocity of the fluid squared, plus the density of the fluid, equals the Bernouli Constant. And that may mean nothing to you, (it confuses the heck out of me) but it keeps airplanes in the air.  And, with the spin imparted by a flick of the wrist, it also keeps a Frisbee floating on the air.

Warren explained the Bernouli constant to Fred, and Fred diagramed the basic pie plate shape, except he added a thick outer edge to mimic an airplane’s wing. He called the angle toward the center of the plate “The Morrison Slope”.  

The pair then drove down to Glendale, California (above), where they showed Fred's drawings to the Southern California Plastic Company. The manager saw the potential and handed over eight cylinders of a new plastic called Tennite,   Fred then drew eight variations on his original drawing.  But before they handed the plastic over to a machinist to carve the drawings into reality, he changed the title on the plans, to disguise the product. He labeled the schematics “Diaphragms for Elephants”.  I guess he figured that title would not arouse any curiosity.

Fred and Warren tested the molded diaphragms, and delivered the one that flew the best back to Glendale.  In 1948 the first production run of 3,000 Whirlo-Ways (patent #183626) were squeezed out of the injection molds in just two colors, black and blue.  Lucile wrote the copy for the packaging, instructing customers to “Play catch – invent games. Experiment!”  In 1951 Warren reenlisted in the Air Force for the Korean War, and Fred and Lucy continued to develop the Whirlo-Ways by themselves.

Marketing now took over. The Whirlo-Ways became Whirloways, which became Flyin-Saucers, and  Flying Saucers became Pluto Platters. But the basics of the device did not change; it was a thing that, when you threw it, it floated and bobbed and weaved with a grace that a ball can only dream of.

In 1955, while Fred and Lucile were displaying their Pluto Platters in Los Angeles, they were spotted by two falcon hunters, who had formed a company to market their plastic sling shot, intended to propel meat into the air for training birds of prey. They named their company “Wham-O” after the shout they made when firing their sling shots. But Arthur "Spud" Melin and Richard Knerr were smart enough to realize that most of their slingshots were not being bought by falconers. The problem was they weren’t sure who was buying them.

So they decided to change products, and jumped at the chance to use their meager sling shot profits to buy the North American rights to an Australian bamboo exercise tool which, duplicated in plastic, became the Hula Hoop. Wham-O then sold 25 million Hula Hoops in four months, 100 million in two years. In 1956 the pair used their profits from the Hula Hoops to pay Fred and Lucille one million dollars for the patent and the molds of the Pluto Platters.

Wham-O’s designers made some improvements on the platters, and in 1958, the year after Frisbie Pies had shut down, they renamed the Pluto Platter as the Frisbee. Why they chose that name I have never been able to discover to my satisfaction. But I suspect somebody in the Wham-O marketing department was a Yale Alumni. Ivy League gets the credit for everything, you know, even the stuff they had nothing to do with. The rest is Frisbee history.

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