FriSbeE

Rich Knerr and A.K."Spud" Melin fresh from the University of Southern California were making slingshots in their fledgling toy company when they first saw Morrison's flying saucers whizzing around southern California beaches. They were interested in this exciting simple thing that employed the basic principles of physics, primary ingredients in all their products to come. In late 1955, they cornered Morrison while he was hawking his wares and tying up traffic on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. Just before he was asked to break it up by the local gendarmerie, the dynamic duo invited his to their San Gabriel factory and made him a proposition.
Thus, fling saucers landed on the West Coast in San Gabriel, and on January 13, 1957, they began to fly out from a production line that has since sent over one hundred million sailing all over the globe.
"At first the saucers had trouble catching on," Rich Knerr reminisces, "but we were confident they were good, so we sprinkled them in different parts of the country to prime the market." On a trip to the campuses of the Ivy League, Knerr first heard the term "Frisbee." Harvard students said they'd tossed pie tins about for years, and called it Frisbie-ing. Knerr liked the terms Frisbie and Frisbie-ing, so he borrowed them. Having no idea of the historical origins, he spelled the saucer "Frisbee", phonetically correct, but one vowel away from the Frisbie Pie Company.
Today "Frisbee" is a regsitered trademark of Mattel (http://www.mattel.com/).

From: Frisbee, A Practitioner's Manual and Definitive Treatise
By: Stancil E.D. Johnson, M.D.