Great article on the origin of frisbee. It also demonstrates the effect of trademark dilution, where a brand name is used to refer to any generic kind of that product (such as Xerox and Kleenex).

Those pie tins must have been Frisbee-shaped indeed; I never frisbeed a pie tin in my life but it turned upside down long before it arrived.

Great history. Thanks for that post.

Regarding the origin of the name Frisbie, which I wondered about, someone posted the following on the Frisbie Family Genealogy Forum:

"According to Appendix A of the 1984 Frisbie Genealogy (Pg 857), States "..that the name is English and that is was taken from one of two hamlets called Frisby in Leicestershire (pronounced Lester-sheer) in England."

Sam Brown
Benbrook, TX"

Yes, that's correct, and Frisby (earlier Frisebie) means 'farmstead of the Friesians' (from Old Norse Frisir by). One of those hamlets, by the way, is Frisby on the Wreake -- love those English hamlets!

Extraordinary. Despite already knowing the outline of the story, and that it concerned metal plates that had contained pies, I still misread the first two occurrences of "pie tin" as "tie pin".

This being LH, Zackary S B, I would just like to point out, or let you know, that no shire county in England is ever end-pronounced 'sheer'. Leicestershire is Lestersha, Yorkshire is Yorksha, Lancashire is Lancasha...etc. Not even the BBC announcers of the 30's went so far as to 'sheer' a shire. Would you pronounce Alabama 'Alaba-marr' with the emphasis on the last syllable? A small point, no doubt, but an annoying one that separates our similar languages, it seems.

But, Rixdollars, what about the Beatles in that song that begins "I read the news today, oh, boy..."?? They do the "shEEr" pronunciation, which is where most of us Yanks probably got the notion (I know I did) that "shEEr" was the British pronunciation of "...shire".

"Sha"? Sheer nonsense ... "Shia", as in "Sunni and ...". John Lennon's pronunciation of "Blackburn, LancaSHEER" in "A Day in the Life" was partly a product of his Liverpudlian accent and partly the way the stresses fell in the song - the normal stressing, even on the banks of the Mersey, would be LANcashia ...

I wonder how many Frisbee-throwing Friesians on chilly North Sea beaches have realised their homeland is indirectly commemorated in the name of the object they are tossing backwards and forwards?

So the term "Frisbee" didn't actually originate in Hill Valley in 1885 when Marty McFly used the Frisbee pie tin to knock the gun out of Buford Tannen's hand? Man, I'm so disappointed.