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Frisbee Feats | Outrageous Acts of Science

 
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 1:19 am    Post subject: Frisbee Feats | Outrageous Acts of Science Reply with quote

Back in 1957, when I was nine years old, I had one of the earliest Frisbees sold.

For the first few days, I wasn't very impressed by how it flew. Then a friend who also had one pointed out that I was throwing it upside down.

Oh.

After that (like, for the next fifty-seven years) I've been pretty good with a Frisbee. I used to teach my students how to throw them during recess.

But the guy in this video is the King of Frisbees. He does things with that flying disc that make you wonder if he sold his soul to the devil.

That's the only explanation for such superhuman ability.





Want more examples of the unholy skill with a Frisbee possessed by superstar Brodie Smith? Okay, click and behold!





* Ah, come on, don't leave without adding a reply! Very Happy
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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 4:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Okay, he's some kind of alien.

Bud Brewster wrote:
Back in 1957, when I was nine years old, I had one of the earliest Frisbees sold.

Me, too. And it must have been pretty near the same time. The one I had was called a "Pluto Platter", although still made by Wham-O. It had a low relief design molded in that suggested a flying saucer. One of the best values I've ever gotten for my money.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 1:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

orzel-w wrote:
Me, too. And it must have been pretty near the same time. The one I had was called a "Pluto Platter", although still made by Wham-O. It had a low relief design molded in that suggested a flying saucer. One of the best values I've ever gotten for my money.

I don't remember if mine had any writing on it -- either "Pluto Platter" or "Wham-o". But the pictures on the web of the Pluto Platters show that they differ from the one I had in an important way.

However, if "a low relief design" means yours was flatter on top than the Frisbees official design (both today and the one patented in 1957), we may have had the same kind. I can't find a picture of mine on the web, but I took the drawing of the original design that's on record at the Patent Office --





-- and modified the profile to make it resemble the odd design of mine.





It was bright green, and at the center was a white spiral with about three turns. It was definitely meant to look like a flying saucer, with that raised feature in the middle as the "bridge" of the ship.

I have a vivid memory of playing in the street with a friend who had a red one that was more rounded than mine. It was obviously the patented design shown above. We were throwing our Frisbee's back and forth, skipping them off the asphalt and seeing how close the Frisbees could get to each other as they passed at the midpoint between us.

Great kidhood memory.

It would be just my luck to learn that mine was some rare version that's now worth thousands of dollars. In the 1960s I had movie posters and Marvel comics that I later learned were worth large sums of money -- after they were no longer in my possession. Sad

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Last edited by Bud Brewster on Wed Feb 19, 2020 10:25 am; edited 1 time in total
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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 3:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My Pluto Platter was yellow. Several years after I bought it I went to Disneyland for the first time. Back then (early '60s) in Tomorrowland they had a circular area next to the AstroJets for demonstrations of Thimbledrome U-control model airplanes (the kind that fly around in a circle, with strings attached as elevator controls). In between the airplane demos the flyers would toss Frisbees. That's where I first learned about underhanded tossing and skipping Frisbees off the pavement.
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Eadie
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 18, 2020 9:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Frisbee – 2 ideas created this product. The first, a Connecticut pie baker, William Russel Frisbie, came up with a marketing plan in 1870 to sell his pies. He impressed his name on the bottom of reusable tin plates that his company sold their pies in with the intention that housewives would take the plate to bake a pie, see his name, and think about how much easier it’d be to just buy one. His business boomed and in the 1940s, students at Yale used the tins to throw them to each other and catch them. The second idea came about in the 1950s when Walter Frederick Morrison designed a saucer disc and sold his idea of playing catch with them to Wham-O. While the president of Wham-O toured college campuses across the country he noticed what the students at Yale were doing with the tins. Coming back to CA, he renamed the saucer disc after Frisbie only changing the “i” to another “e” to avoid legal issues.



For Pluto platter images go to http://www.marvinsflyingdisccollection.com/wham-o-pluto-platter.html

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