Did you go on to study science and engineering in school?

I got a job as an electronics technician in my late teens and very swiftly started taking on engineering tasks, I’m self-taught.

You didn’t go to college?

No, but but I taught college. I taught at Stanford for many years. I taught a course in sensors and also mentored mechanical engineering students and I still lecture there.

I certainly had the ability [as a student] but I didn’t always have the discipline to do all the work. I recall one incident in plane geometry class where I submitted a very unusual proof and the teacher asked me to do the proof on the blackboard for the rest of the class, which I did. And she looked sort of stunned. I realized afterward that she thought that my father must have done that proof, which he couldn’t do actually. My grades were about average. I was eager to get out and earn a living and be on my own.

How did you learn the sophisticated principles at work in your inventions?

I read voraciously. When I first took on the responsibility of being an engineer and designing circuits, I probably read till 1:00 every single night for weeks.

When did you start working on projects of your own?

Very early. I got my first patent in the early 1960s. It was a portable lamp, which had a circuit which converted three-volt battery power into high voltage to power a fluorescent bulb. But it never got into production. I submitted it to a number of flashlight manufacturers without acceptance. Rayovac eventually brought out something almost identical to what I had submitted but they didn’t buy a license from me.

How did you get into the toy industry?

I designed a toy called the Slapsie, which was a bunch of interlocking plates that moved like a Slinky toy moves. And I licensed that to Wham-O.

How did you make that deal?

I made a prototype out of wood and I spent about a year submitting that to about a dozen companies, including Wham-O twice. At the end of a year, I had all rejections. So I approached a molding company to actually make molds of my design to pop together. Then I called up Wham-O and explained that I had molded plastic prototypes, and they agreed to see me. Previously they had only agreed to accept submissions by mail. I went to Wham-O in San Gabriel, California, with a whole suitcase full of these products. And they loved it. They told me that that year they had had ten thousand submissions and mine was the only one they bought. They put it into production but it never sold real well. And I have the rights to it today.

What led you to improve on the Frisbee?

Whenever I played with a Frisbee I was conscious of how thick it was. It’s over an inch thick and has to push a lot of air out of the way in order to fly. So I set about trying to design a thin Frisbee. And I made many, many thin discs but I wasn’t satisfied with the straightness of flight so I began to experiment with rings, and I came up with Skyro, a ring that flew much, much farther, more than twice as far. They sold about a million and they set a couple nice World Records. But theoretically it was only stable at one speed. It would sail fine but not as straight. I set about trying to come up with a disk that was stable at all speeds. By this time Parker Brothers had made a million Skyros and returned the rights to me. Eventually I developed a little ridge on the perimeter, [like an airfoil]. The effect of that was just absolutely magical.