Frisbees were pie in the sky!
QUESTION Were Frisbees originally baking tins?
The idea of flying a pie tin, cake tin or paint can lid was not original, it just so happened that the pie tins used by the Frisbie Pie Company, of Connecticut, had aerodynamic properties particularly well suited to flying.
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. Frisbie died in 1903 and his son, Joseph P., took over.
Under his ownership the company expanded across hartford, Connecticut; Poughkeepsie, New York; and Providence, Rhode Island.
It is thought that truck drivers for the company were the first to toss Frisbie Pie tins around the loading docks during idle times. The tins bore the words ‘Frisbie’s Pies’ and had six small holes in the centre, in a star pattern, that thrummed when they flew.
The sport moved to eastern colleges (probably first at Yale), where students shouted ‘Frisbie!’ to warn people of incoming projectiles.
The inventor of the modern plastic disc was Walter Frederick ‘Fred’ Morrison (1920-2010) a World War II veteran, who ended the war in the notorious Stalag 13 PoW camp. During a Thanksgiving Day family picnic in 1937, Morrison and his future wife Lu Nay had tossed the lid of a popcorn tin back and forth for fun.
The tin dented easily, so they moved on to cake pans. Soon, Morrison was selling ‘Flying Cake Pans’ for 25 cents each on the beaches of Santa Monica, California.
After he learned the principles of aerodynamics as a bomber pilot, Morrison created the Whirlo-Way with another former pilot, Warren Franscioni. They changed the name to the Flyin’-Saucer to take advantage of the Fifties UFO craze. After disappointing sales, Morrison and Franscioni parted ways in early 1950.
In 1955, Morrison and Lu designed the Pluto Platter, the archetype of all modern flying discs. The outer perimeter, his fundamental design feature, is named the Morrison Slope. It was this version of the disk that caught the eye of Spud Melin and Dick Knerr at Wham-O game company.
The pair went into partnership with Morrison. On a sales trip to the campuses of the Ivy League, Knerr first heard the term ‘Frisbie’. Knerr liked the name, but, having no idea of the historical origins, spelled the saucer ‘Frisbee’. The first Frisbee was launched on January 13, 1957, sparking a global craze.
Will Parish, Stone, Staffs.
QUESTION Did Shakespeare plagiarise the story of
Romeo And Juliet?
WITh the exception of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest, which are original stories, Shakespeare borrowed his plots, down to fine detail, from historical and contemporary authors.
he adapted the stories of the classical authors such as Plutarch (Antony And Cleopatra, Comedy Of errors, Julius Caesar), Ovid (Merry Wives Of Windsor) and Seneca (hamlet, Macbeth) for a modern audience. he dramatised the lives of english kings recorded in the works of historians such as Raphael holinshed, John Bale, Geoffrey of Monmouth and John Foxe.
Shakespeare’s primary source for Romeo And Juliet was a poem by Arthur Brooke called The Tragicall historye Of Romeus And Juliet, written in 1562.
The Bard also borrowed from the three sources on which Brooke’s poem was based — namely, Giulietta e Romeo, a novella by Italian author Matteo Bandello, written in 1554; a story in a collection called Il Novellio, by popular 15th-century writer Masuccio Salernitano; and the historia Novellamente Ritrovata di Due Nobili Amanti or A Story Newly Found Of Two Noble Lovers, written by Luigi Da Porto and published in 1530.
Practically nothing is known of Arthur Brooke. A man of that name existed, born in about 1544 and drowned early in 1564 on his way to help Protestant forces in France, but some consider the poem a youthful composition by elizabethan playwright edward de Vere (1550-1604).
Unlike Shakespeare’s tragedy, Brooke’s ‘cautionary tale for young lovers’ has been criticised for the ‘ dullness’ of this ‘ long, moralising poem’. According to Geoffrey Bullough: ‘Brooke’sBroo poem is a leaden work which Shakespeare transmuted into gold’, and marvelled that ‘the surprising thing is that Shakespeare preserved so much of his source in vitalising this dead stuff ’.
The playwright wasn’t doing anything illegal by borrowing this material. The Statute of Anne 1710 was the first legislation to grant intellectual property rights and protection to owners of creative work, almost 100 years after Shakespeare’s death.
Arthur Beith, London E15.
QUESTION When the National Coal Board closed the mines, was all the machinery removed or is it still underground?
FURTheR to the two previous answers, it is true that there are millions of pounds worth of mining equipment rusting away hundreds of feet below the surface.
however, the salvage of underground machinery is time- consuming and very expensive. Most collieries that closed in South Wales in the eighties and Nineties were at least 50 years old.
Typically they had about 20 miles of underground roadways, with the last coalproducing faces being at least two miles from the bottom of the shaft.
Mining machinery is very large. It is not possible to lower this machinery down a shaft and drive it or drag it into where you wish it to work, for two reasons.
First, shafts are rarely more than 6m in diameter, with the two cages or skips each taking up 50 per cent of the space. Second, the underground roadways deteriorate the further they travel from the bottom of the shaft, especially those near where the coal is worked, as they become crushed by the weight of the strata above.
All machinery is taken down the pit in pieces, transported to where it will be used, and rebuilt on site. A new production coalface can take six to 12 months to prepare and equip.
Salvaging this equipment to realise its scrap value would involve a massive amount of labour, time and cost. Factor in the fluctuating price of scrap metal and you can see the dilemma.
The surface infrastructure of a typical mine presented many sources for scrap recovery, however. The winding engines and power plant would yield vast amounts of copper wire, the pit-head winding framework was made entirely of steel, the screens and coal washeries had large amounts, and there were miles of steel railway track.
Tenders were submitted by contractors to secure the work of dismantling the surface, with the potential value of the scrap to be recovered taken into account. Lyn Pask, former mine surveyor,
Blackwood, Gwent.
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