Walter Fredrick Morrison, who at 17 sent the lid of a popcorn tin skimming through the air of a California backyard and as an adult remade the lid in plastic, in the process inventing the simple, elegant flying disc known today as the Frisbee, died Tuesday at his home in Monroe, Utah. He was 90.

The cause was cancer, said Phil Kennedy, the author with Mr. Morrison of “Flat Flip Flies Straight: True Origins of the Frisbee”(Wormhole Publishers, 2006).

Beloved of man and dog, the Frisbee has for more than half a century been the signature product of Wham-O, a toy and sporting-goods manufacturer based in Emeryville, Calif. The company has sold more than 200 million of the discs since acquiring the rights to Mr. Morrison’s Pluto Platter, as it was then known, in 1957.

At least since antiquity, mankind has been hurling flat, round objects  or flying discs, as they are known in aficionados’ parlance  aloft. But Mr. Morrison is widely credited as having designed the first commercial flying disc expressly manufactured and marketed as such.