Morrison made a mint selling glorified pie tins to kids – an American hero. Image: Sweded.

Dearly Departed: The inventor of the Frisbee, Walter Frederick Morrison, 1920-2009.

Cause Of Death: Complications from cancer.

Greatest Achievement: Inventing the Frisbee, and by proxy, inventing the interminable “sports” of Frisbee golf and Ultimate Frisbee.

There was no designated “inventor” of the ball. Or of the stick. Or the skimming rock. Or even the bat and racquet. But there is an acknowledged inventor of the universal flat, round item tossed between man and woman, boy and girl, dog but never cat. That man’s name was Fred Morrison.

Like many Homo sapiens throughout history (discus was first recorded as an event in 708BC), Fred was partial to flicking things through the air in the balmy summer sun. He credited one particular day, when he and girlfriend Lu (who went on to become his wife) were gaily whipping a popcorn tin lid across a park after a picnic, with the inspiration to mass-market a sports-specific “flying disc”.

Amazingly, from that bright day in 1937, it took another 20 years to get his disc to the mass market. The Frisbee went through a more gruelling product-testing phase than is probably necessary for an item whose attributes almost wholly comprise ’roundness’ and ‘flatness’. Discovering cake tins were more aerodynamically adept, Fred and Lu took to selling “Flyin’ Cake Pans” on Santa Monica beach.

Sure, there was the minor diversion of World War II, when Morrison was enlisted in the Air Force and flew a P-47 Thunderbolt out of Italy. He was shot down and spent a 48-day internment as a prisoner of war in a notorious German Stalag (sadly it was not the fictitious and seemingly enjoyable Stalag 13).

After the war, the item was refined and renamed the Whirlo-way. Then it was moulded in plastic and renamed the Flyin-Saucer, Fred hoping to cash in on the outer-space fad that swept through the US in the ’50s. By 1955 it was renamed the Pluto Platter. Once he’d added the thicker rim for more stable flight, he finally sold his baby to hunting goods company Wham-O. The company was looking to diversify into sports equipment but ended up producing children’s playthings that became fads. The Frisbee followed the Hula Hoop and was followed by the Slip N’ Slide and the Super Ball (which Wham-O sold alongside their crossbows, hunting knives and target pistols).

So how did it get renamed a fifth time, to its final incarnation as the Frisbee? This was not a triumph of marketing but of collective unconscious. Less than three years after its debut, Wham-O trademarked ‘Frisbee’ because New Englanders had already been using that name. Workers at the Frisbie Pie Company in Massachusetts had been reportedly tossing tins around on their breaks since 1915 (Wham-O’s changed spelling was to avoid copyright infringement).

Thus, the Frisbee story comes full circle, from tin lids to pie tins. Intrepid inventor and promoter of the world’s favourite flying disc, Fred Morrison, returns to the firmament from which he came, safe in the knowledge that he has brought joy to millions (at least 200 million Frisbees sold, according to Wham-O). His invention joins texta, rollerblades, heroin, e-mail, and other trademarks so iconic that they cease to be brands but become part of our shared language.

He will be missed.