It is the smallest thing in your golf bag, and probably the one you think about least. You push it into the ground, set your ball on top and send it flying, often along with the tee itself. Yet the humble wooden tee has a surprisingly human story, and it starts not with a golf professional, but with a Boston dentist who disliked getting his hands dirty. Welcome to another chapter of our “Golf Origins” series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For centuries, golfers had no tee to speak of. The game’s first written rules, drafted in 1744 by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers for a competition on Leith Links, opened with a simple instruction, as the USGA<\/a> recalls: “You must Tee your Ball within a Club’s length of the Hole.” Rule two added that “your Tee must be upon the Ground.” (You can read more about those pioneering golfers in our story on the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In practice, a “tee” was a small mound of damp sand. According to Scottish Golf History<\/a>, caddies often scooped sand straight out of the hole to build it, which did the holes no favours. Later, courses placed boxes of sand beside each teeing ground, and golfers shaped their little pile by hand or with a cone-shaped mould, as the USGA Museum<\/a> describes. It worked, but it was messy, slow and hard on gloves and fingers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n George Franklin Grant was born in 1846 in Oswego, New York, the son of parents who had escaped slavery. As the Harvard Gazette<\/a> tells it, he was hired at 15 to run errands for a local dentist and soon became his laboratory assistant. In 1867 he moved to Boston, worked as a lab assistant at Harvard Dental School and enrolled the following year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant graduated with distinction in 1870, the second African American to earn a dental degree from Harvard. He joined the school’s teaching staff in 1871 and, according to Harvard Medical School’s history pages<\/a>, became the first African American faculty member at Harvard University. From 1884 he was Instructor in the Treatment of Cleft Palate and Cognate Diseases, and he designed and patented a prosthetic, the “oblate palate”, that helped patients speak and eat more normally. His patients reportedly even included Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Away from the dental chair, Grant was a keen golfer who played in a meadow near his home in Arlington, Massachusetts. Like everyone else, he teed up on sand, and he did not enjoy it. So he did what a skilled dental technician would do: he designed a better tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He filed his patent application on 1 July 1899, and on 12 December 1899 he was granted US Patent No. 638,920<\/a> for a “Golf-Tee”. The original patent drawing<\/a> is held today by the US National Archives. His design had two parts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The clever part was that soft rubber head. When the club struck the ball, it simply bent out of the way, so the tee did not slow the swing. Grant’s own patent explained it perfectly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “\u2026yield in the direction of travel of the ball, offering no obstruction to its flight.”<\/p>George F. Grant, US Patent No. 638,920, 1899<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n You will often read that Grant “invented the golf tee”. The full story is a little more nuanced. In Scotland, William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas of North Berwick had already devised a portable rubber tee in 1889, and several other tees with rubber tops and spikes were patented in Britain and the United States during the 1890s, as Scottish Golf History<\/a> records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What makes Grant special is that his peg, pushed into the ground with a ball resting on top, looks remarkably like the tee we use today. Both Harvard<\/a> e i USGA<\/a> describe his patent as the first for a wooden golf tee in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was one catch: Grant never sold it. He had prototypes made for his own use and handed them out to family and friends. When he died in 1910, his invention was still largely unknown outside his circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDr. George F. Grant: A Life of Firsts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A Better Way to Tee Up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
So Did Grant Invent the Golf Tee?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n