The man who invented the Frisbee – the simple plastic disc that became a billion-dollar craze and a symbol of misspent youth on beaches, parks, and university campuses all over the world – has died, at the age of 90.

Walter Frederick Morrison, a pilot, carpenter and entrepreneur who developed the toy from the lid of a popcorn tin, passed away at his ranch in Utah on Tuesday.

The Frisbee story began on the afternoon of Thanksgiving 1937, when Morrison and his then-girlfriend, Lucile 'Lu' Nay began tossing the circular lid of a popcorn tin around in the yard of her mother's house.

When the disc became dented, they swapped it for a sturdier cake pan. A few days later, a passer-by saw them throwing the pan across a beach in southern California, and offered to buy it – thereby convincing the couple that they could make money from the product.

Sales didn't really take off until the mid-1950s, when Morrison tweaked the design and stamped the names of the planets of the solar system around its rim, renaming it the "Pluto Platter".

In 1957, he caught the eye of a Californian toy company called Wham-O. The firm bought exclusive rights to the Pluto Platter from Morrison, in exchange for lifetime royalties.

Wham-O's marketing executives decided to rename the toy 'Frisbee'. The name-change was a marketing triumph. The Frisbee promptly became a national craze. Despite the fame and fortune it brought him, Morrison apparently never liked the Frisbee name. "He thought it didn't apply to anything," his biographer Phil Kennedy said. "It was just a crazy name that didn't mean anything."