TL;DR: Before the wooden tee existed, golfers built small mounds of wet sand at the start of each hole to lift the ball off the ground. George F. Grant, the first African American to graduate from Harvard Dental School, patented the wooden tee in 1899 and never sold a single one. He gave them away to friends, and the invention sat dormant until other inventors reinvented and mass-marketed it in the 1920s. Original prints of the 1899 patent drawing are available framed or unframed.
In 1899, a Boston dentist named George F. Grant filed a patent for a small wooden peg with a tapered bottom and a narrow concave cup at the top. The design was simple enough to carve from a single piece of wood. Grant used the tees himself and handed them out to friends. He had no intention of commercializing the invention and never did. He died in 1910 without ever being recognized for an object that every golfer on earth now uses at the start of every par-4 and par-5.
The Sand Tee: Golf's Messy First Solution
The need to elevate the ball at the start of a hole is as old as the game itself. Hitting a ball directly off packed earth made clean contact difficult and inconsistent, and the ground conditions on early Scottish links courses were too variable to rely on a good lie at every tee box. By the early 1500s, golfers had developed a practical solution: wet sand.
Courses supplied boxes of damp sand at each hole, and golfers would pinch out a small mound, press it into the desired height, and balance the ball on top before driving. The system worked in the most basic sense. It was also messy, inconsistent, dependent on the sand being the right moisture level, and required rebuilding at every hole. On a wet day, the sand was heavy and cold. On a dry day, it crumbled before the ball could be positioned. The name "tee box" survives from this practice, a linguistic remnant of the wooden boxes of wet sand that once sat at the start of each hole.
Golfers found the process tedious enough that inventors began looking for alternatives almost as soon as the sport developed a critical mass of players.
The First Patents: Bloxsom, Douglas, and Ellis
The first patented attempt at a reusable tee came in 1889, when two Scottish inventors, William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas, received a patent for a device that could raise the ball off the ground without fixing it into the earth. Their design kept the ball elevated but rested on top of the turf rather than being anchored in it. In a light wind, the tee could shift or tip before the ball was struck. It was an improvement on sand but not a complete solution.
The first tee designed to be pushed into the ground came in 1892, when Percy Ellis of Surrey, England patented a design with a pointed base intended to be driven into the turf. Ellis solved the stability problem that the Bloxsom and Douglas design had left open. A tee that anchored in the ground held its position regardless of wind or an accidental knock, and the ball sat cleanly above the grass at a consistent, repeatable height.
From Ellis's 1892 patent, a series of inventors iterated on the basic concept, each refining the shape, the materials, or the mechanism. The problem they were all solving was the same: replace the sand mound with something portable, consistent, and reusable. The design that solved it most elegantly arrived in 1899.
George F. Grant and the 1899 Patent
George Franklin Grant was born in 1847 in Oswego, New York. He studied dentistry and in 1870 became the first African American to graduate from Harvard Dental School, where he would later join the faculty as a clinical instructor. He was a skilled dental inventor in his own right, holding a patent for an improved dental bridge. He was also an avid golfer, and the frustration of building sand mounds before every drive led him to design something better.
Grant's 1899 patent covered a wooden tee with a tapered bottom designed to be pushed into the ground and a narrow concave top to cradle the ball. The concave cup was a refinement over earlier designs: it held the ball in a slightly different orientation than a flat or rounded top, reducing lateral movement at address. The design was compact, inexpensive to produce, and required no assembly or mechanism. It was, in retrospect, the solved form of a problem that had occupied golf inventors for a decade.
Grant received the patent. He then proceeded to do nothing with it commercially. He made tees for himself, gave them to friends and playing partners, and did not announce the design or seek distribution. He had no interest in building a business around the tee, and by every account the invention was an expression of personal preference rather than commercial ambition.
Grant died in 1910. His patent was allowed to lapse. The tee he had designed remained unknown to most of the golf world.
The Reddy Tee and Mass Commercialization
Over a decade after Grant's design had gone dormant, the problem resurfaced. Golfers were still piling sand at the tee box. The sand box was still messy and inconsistent. Another dentist, Dr. William Lowell of Maplewood, New Jersey, designed a wooden tee with a flared top and filed a patent in 1920. His design, marketed under the name "Reddy Tee," was the first wooden golf tee to achieve commercial success at scale.
Lowell had something Grant never pursued: a distribution strategy. He hired professional golfers, including Walter Hagen, to use and endorse the Reddy Tee at tournaments. The visibility worked. By the mid-1920s, wooden tees were becoming standard practice across American golf courses, and the sand box began disappearing from tee areas.
Lowell's commercialization succeeded where Grant's patent sat unused. But Grant's 1899 design predates Lowell's by more than two decades and shares the core features of the wooden stake with a concave top that became standard across the industry. The golf world largely forgot Grant. His contribution was not formally recognized until decades after his death, when golf historians and the USGA began documenting the full history of the tee.
The Golf Tee Today
The wooden tee that Grant patented in 1899 is still the dominant form factor at golf courses worldwide. The concave top, the tapered stake, the single-piece wooden construction: the fundamentals of his design survived commercialization, material changes, and over a century of competitive iterations essentially intact.
Modern tees are manufactured from hardwood, bamboo, plastic, and biodegradable composites. Tees with zero-friction tops, brush-style tees, and height-limiting tees have all found market niches among players focused on reducing resistance at impact or standardizing ball height. None of them has displaced the basic wooden tee. Every year, billions of wooden tees are manufactured and used at golf courses around the world. The object at the center of all of them traces a direct line back to a Boston dentist who gave his invention away.
The 1899 patent drawing shows Grant's design in the economical style of late-Victorian engineering documents: the tapered stake, the concave cup, the simple geometry of a solution that had been obvious once someone drew it out clearly enough. The drawing itself is a record of the moment the modern tee was defined, before the commercial market had a chance to complicate it.
Shop Golf Tee Patent Art Prints
The original U.S. Patent Office drawing that defined how every drive begins. Starting at $49.99 unframed.
Golf Tee (1899), George F. Grant
Grant's 1899 patent is one of the most historically significant drawings in the golf collection. The first African American graduate of Harvard Dental School patented the modern wooden tee, gave the tees to friends, and died in 1910 without recognition for an invention used billions of times each year. The print carries a story worth knowing, and the drawing itself is spare and elegant in the way that genuinely useful inventions tend to be.
Best for: History-minded golfers, gift buyers, anyone who appreciates the untold stories behind everyday objects
Frequently Asked Questions
Who invented the golf tee?
George F. Grant, a Boston dentist and the first African American to graduate from Harvard Dental School, patented the wooden golf tee in 1899. His design featured a tapered wooden stake meant to be driven into the ground and a narrow concave top to hold the ball. Grant never commercialized the patent and gave the tees away to friends. The wooden tee was reinvented and mass-marketed by Dr. William Lowell under the Reddy Tee brand in the 1920s.
What did golfers use before wooden tees?
Before wooden tees, golfers built small mounds of wet sand at the start of each hole to elevate the ball for driving. Golf courses supplied boxes of damp sand at each tee area, and players would form a mound by hand before every shot. The process was messy and inconsistent, which motivated inventors to develop reusable alternatives throughout the late 1800s.
When was the first golf tee patented?
The first patented golf tee designs appeared in the late 1880s. William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas received a patent in 1889 for a tee that rested on top of the turf, and Percy Ellis patented a ground-anchoring design in 1892. George F. Grant's 1899 patent is considered the direct predecessor of the modern wooden tee, featuring the tapered stake and concave cup design that became standard in the 20th century.
Why didn't George Grant commercialize his tee patent?
Grant appears to have invented the tee for personal use rather than commercial gain. He made tees for himself and gave them to friends and playing partners but made no effort to manufacture or distribute the design at scale. There is no record of Grant seeking investors, approaching manufacturers, or marketing the tee. He was a successful dentist and educator whose interest in the tee was practical rather than entrepreneurial.
What golf patent art prints are available?
The original U.S. Patent Office drawing for the golf tee (1899) by George F. Grant is available as a framed or unframed print from Timeless Patents. Each print is a reproduction of the actual engineering drawing filed when the invention was new, rendered in a watercolor style on museum-quality paper. See the full golf patent art collection →
Written by Rider Tuff, founder of Timeless Patents. Timeless Patents makes museum-quality patent art prints from original U.S. Patent Office documents, celebrating the inventors behind your favorite sports, hobbies, and passions. Every print is available framed or unframed, starting at $49.99. Shop the full golf collection →
