ANSWER
The Frisbee was named after the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Tossing around the company's metal pie tins was a popular activity among Yale students in the late 19th century. Since getting bonked in the head with a flying metal pie tin could be a painful experience, the students took to the practice of yelling "Frisbie!" before unleashing the spinning metal discs.
After World War II, inventor Fred Morrison invented a plastic flying disc predecessor of the modern Frisbee, called the Pluto Platter. The idea was to capitalize on the current UFO/flying saucer craze that was sweeping the nation at the time, and he eventually sold his idea to California toy maker Wham-O. Unfortunately, the Pluto Platter did not fly very well. It wasn't until fellow inventor "Steady" Ed Headrick, working for Wham-O at the time, added little ridges to the top of the disc to improve its aerodynamics that the plastic discs began to fly straight and true. This was event marks the birth of the Frisbee as we know it today. The basic design of the Frisbee has changed very little since the original Headrick design.
Fred Morrison was awarded a patent for the flying disc in 1958. Strangely, this was the same year the Frisbie Pie Company, founded in 1871 by William Russell Frisbie, went out of business. "Steady" Ed Headrick was awarded a patent for the first "professional" Frisbee in 1966. He later went on to found the International Frisbee Association and the Professional Disc Golf Association. Wham-O, the company that also gave us the Hula-Hoop, Superball, and Hacky Sack, sold over 100 million Frisbees before being acquired by Mattel in 1994.
Headrick, who passed away last month at the age of 78, will have his ashes pressed into a limited number of "memorial flying discs", to be given to family and friends, with some to be sold to raise funds for a future Frisbee museum.
Headrick was quoted as saying, "We used to say that Frisbee is really a religion -- 'Frisbyterians,' we'd call ourselves. When we die, we don't go to purgatory. We just land up on the roof and lay there."
WHO GOT IT RIGHT: Cindi Lou, Bob Milligan, Robin Campbell, Steve Shuba, Marika Thiessen, John Fitzpatrick, George Van, Marc Quinlivan, Nevin Smyth, Russ Shaw, William Anderson, Linda Ging, Charles F Jackson, JP Weigt, and Todd Williams.
