Few people in the history of fun can have had such success as Arthur (Spud) Melin, who died on June 28th aged 77, the co-inventor of the Hula-Hoop and manufacturer of the Frisbee, the Superball, the Hacky Sack and a long inventory of wheezes.
Born in Los Angeles on December 30th, 1924, he and his boyhood pal, later business partner, Richard (Rich) Knerr, studied at the University of South California. Their hobby was breeding falcons, and training them to dive by lobbing meatballs at them on the wing. Their projectile launcher was a home-made version of one of man's oldest weapons, the slingshot. They tried to sell their birds to enthusiasts, but got more interest for the shot, which they named Wham-O, for the sensation felt when it hit the target.
By 1948, they had moved into Knerr's Los Angeles garage, where Spud Melin cut slingshots with a handsaw, Knerr sanded, and both sold, personally first, then by mail-order and through dealers all over the United States. They expanded their Wham-O company to the corner of a failed grocery store, then to a factory, and went into pellet guns, throwing knives and boomerangs. Their Air Blaster could blow out a candle at 25 feet.
Their first major development was a buy-in - the Frisbee. Its origins are disputed, but seem to have been in empty pie tins from the Frisbie Baking Company, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, tossed around the ivy-league campus of Yale - or Princeton, Dartmouth, Amherst and Middlebury, each of which claims to be its home. Whatever the truth, in 1948 two ex-army pilots adapted the principle, and, in 1951, one Fred Morrison used war surplus plastic to produce the Rotary Fingernail Clipper, later known as the Flyin' Saucer.
It did not sell well, but Morrison demonstrated it to Wham-O in 1955, as the pluto platter; Spud Melin and Knerr bought the novelty for $1 million (plus lifetime royalties for Morrison), and marketed the toy as the Fling Saucer. In 1958, they renamed it the Frisbee, either because that was the phoneticisation of the trade name as heard by Knerr on a college tour, or after Mr Frisbie, a US comic strip.
It became Wham-O's long, slow seller, with its own plant in San Gabriel, California, taking off in the 1960s as a counter-cultural exercise, the toy of hippies and of guys trying to impress their girls with Frisbee flips - "Flat flip flies straight. Tilted flip curves. When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a Frisbee," they said. One hundred million platters have been sold, and as Spud Melin hoped, they became a sport - the basis of the team game Ultimate, with world championships, and disc golf on 500 courses worldwide.
Wham-O's most famous contribution to silliness, the Hula-Hoop, was born in 1957. According to company legend, a visiting Australian casually mentioned to Spud Melin how, back home as a kid, he had rotated a rattan, or bamboo hoop, around his waist in gym class. Spud Melin's genius saw the potential, and, after prototype trials with Pasadena children, manufactured, with Knerr, a hollow cylinder in light, durable polyurethane.
Wham-O named them for the Hawaiian-dance-like hip rotations needed to keep them aloft. The bosses explained that they patented the mechanical principle behind it, the ratio of waist to diameter: "Small hoops or big waists just won't work."
In the summer of 1958, the craze hit the US, selling 40 million $1.98 hoops and producing $45 million in profits.
However, when the weather cooled and the kids went back to school, the fad was over, and Wham-O had millions of unsold hoops. So they marketed abroad, first in Europe, then everywhere, although Japan banned them as lewd, and the Soviet Union called them "an example of the emptiness of American culture". Nonetheless, Hula-Hoops remain the most extraordinary US global imposition - travelling faster in two years than Coca-Cola in decades.
Wham-O kept an open door to inventors, pro or amateur: 20 nutty ideas arrived daily, including, in the early 1960s, the offer from a chemical engineer of an accidentally compressed plastic, Zectron, which bounced uncontrollably. After two years of development, its tendency to fly apart was overcome and its 92 per cent recovery rate realised for the springy Superball. A giant promotional specimen accidentally dropped from a 23rd-floor hotel room window, rebounded 15 floors and destroyed a parked convertible as it fell again. The ball was uninjured. The domestic size sold 20 million.
In 1982, Spud Melin and Knerr sold Wham-O to the Kransco Group for $12 million, but Spud Melin kept up his interest in gadgets - at one point, he patented a two-handed tennis racket with an adjustable handle.
He is survived by his wife and five daughters.
Arthur (Spud) Melin: born 1924; died, June 2002