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The Frisbie Pie Company was founded in 1871 by William Russell Frisbie in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when he bought and renamed a branch of the Olds Baking Company. The company was located on Kossuth Street in Bridgeport's East Side, where nearby schoolchildren tossed the plates around and yelled "Frisbie" so they wouldn't get hit by the spinning tins. The game the children played made its way to nearby college campuses.
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The "skilled person" theory of origin
It has been noted that Frisbie supplied pies to many Connecticut retailers and restaurants, including the Yale University campus. Yale students "discovered" that the pie tins, inverted, had an airfoil shape which enabled them to be thrown in various trajectories by a "skilled person".
Commercialization
The name Frisbie was picked up by Wham-O, a California-based firm who had acquired the rights to the "Pluto Platter". As the pie tin was the same shape, it was discovered that children were already using the term for the flying disc and therefore a spelling amendment to avoid trademark infringement gave birth to the name Frisbee.
Frisbie pies today
The Bridgeport pie factory itself closed its doors on Kossuth Street in 1958 and Frisbie brand pies were bought out by Table Talk Pies, which are still produced in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In popular culture
In Back to the Future Part III, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) while time-travelling to the Wild West, finds amusement in seeing the word "Frisbie" at the bottom of a pie plate. He later throws the plate at a derringer held by outlaw Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), foiling his attempt to shoot Doctor Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd).