BY AAGD STAFF
Whenever you venture into your golf bag, pant (or skirt) pocket or such, searching for a golf tee, consider Dr. George F. Grant, an African American dental practitioner from Boston (MA). The good doctor of his day played a lot of golf. With his rounds, Dr. Grant realized the antiquated routine with regards to setting up a bit of sand, squeezed together to make a tiny hill, upon which golfers placed their golf balls when preparing for a tee shot. Surely, he must have thought there was a much better way to set up a good tee shot.
And yes, he discovered a much better way.
On Dec. 12, 1899, Dr. Grant got a U.S. patent No. 638,920, the world’s first patent for a golf tee – a wooden spike with an adaptable elastic peg for the ball. Since Dr. Grant was an inventor and not such a marketer, he never received the rewards of his development. He gave a portion of the tees – fabricated in a little shop in Arlington Heights – to companions and golfing buddies. When Grant died of a liver illness in 1910, his creation died with him.
In 1920, Dr. William Lowell of Maplewood, New Jersey, likewise a dental practitioner went to work on a similar invention. His method utilized gutta-percha for golf tees, a similar material that was used to make false teeth and golf balls in the nineteenth century. Be that as it may, those tees were excessively fragile and Lowell changed to using another material–white birch.
In 1922, Dr. Lowell paid PGA legend Walter Hagen and his presentation accomplice, Joe Kirkwood, to play their golf rounds using his “Reddy Tee,” and to discard them on the course as they played. The outcome was $100,000 in golf tee sales that year, which was six years previously Dr. Lowell got his patent and five years previously when he recorded his patent application. He would spend many years (and fortune) battling patent infringements. He died in 1954 at age 91.
In 1991, the United States Golf Association recognized Dr. Grant as the original inventor of the wooden tee.
