San Francisco, Feb 12 (DPA) The inventor of the frisbee, Walter Fredrick Morrison, has died in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the age of 90, local TV station KSL has reported.

Morrison died Tuesday after a prolonged bout with lung cancer, the report said.

Morrison started marketing the discs in 1948 as the Flyin-Saucer, 10 years after he first started tossing around baking tins for fun.

In 1955, he produced a version called the pluto platter with a wider lip and the names of all the solar planets around its rim. He sold the rights to his device in 1957 in exchange for lifetime royalties. The buyer was Wham-0, a California company that had made a fortune selling hula hoops and which has now sold over 200 million frisbees.

'The whole thing's a wonderment!' he said in a 2007 television interview. 'I still shake my head. What have I done to deserve all this? This was not Einstein at work. I didn't add anything to aeronautical sciences by putting a curve on a cake pan.'