The Frisbee first created in 1957
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I was by no means a competetor nor an expert but I did get out there and play with them when few other things caught my interest.
On January 23, 1957, the Wham-O toy company began rolling out the first batch of their plastic disks —
Now known to millions of fans all over the world as Frisbees.
This is primarily a story out of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where one William Frisbie opened the Frisbie Pie Company in 1871.
Students from nearby universities would throw the empty pie tins to each other, yelling "Frisbie!" as they let go.
In 1948, one Walter Frederick Morrison and his partner one Warren Franscioni invented a plastic version of the disk called the “Flying Saucer” that could fly further and more accurately than the tin pie plates.
After splitting with Franscioni, Morrison made an improved model in 1955 and sold it to a new toy company called Wham-O as the “Pluto Platter” in an attempt to cash in on the public craze over space and Unidentified Flying Objects aka "UFOs".
High school kids in Maplewood, New Jersey, invented a game known as Ultimate Frisbee which is a cross between football, soccer and basketball in 1967.
In the 1970s the late Edward Early Headrick, aka "Steady" Ed Headrick invented Frisbee Golf, in which disks are tossed into metal baskets; there are now hundreds of courses in the US with millions of devotees.
There is also Freestyle Frisbee, a choreographed version with routines set to music and multiple disks in play as well as and various Frisbee competitions for both humans and canines — which are the absolute best natural Frisbee players.
Today, at least 60 manufacturers produce the flying disks generally made out of plastic and measuring roughly 8-10 inches in diameter with a curved lip.
Nowadays the official Frisbee is owned by Mattel Toy Manufacturers, who bought the toy from Wham-O in 1994.
I'll likely never play with another but they certainly did have their heyday in my lifetime.