Sand box at the old first tee at the Atlantic City Country Club
Before a black New Jersey dentist invented the wood golf tee, golf balls were placed on small pinches of sand before they were driven with the first shot.
1911-12 US Open Champion John McDermott continued to use pinches of sand even after the golf tee became popular.
The modern tee
An early tee designer who gets a lot of attention today in websites and the popular press is Dr. George Grant, the first black graduate of Harvard's dental school. His version of the tee, patented in 1899, consisted of a vertical rubber tube attached at its base to a carrot-shaped piece of wood. It was not the first-ever golf tee as is often claimed, and in fact did not differ much from the earlier pegs that similarly combined a flexible ball rest and a rigid ground anchor.
Since Grant did not sell or promote his handiwork, it went unnoticed by the golfing public.
George Franklin Grant (September 15, 1846 – August 21, 1910) was the firstAfrican American professor at Harvard. He was also a Boston dentist, and an inventor of a wooden golf tee.
He was born on September 15, 1846 in Oswego, New York to Phillis Pitt and Tudor Elandor Grant.
He attended the Bordentown School for high school.
He entered the Harvard School of Dental Medicine in 1868, and graduated in 1870. He then took a position in the department of Mechanical Dentistry in 1871, making him the Harvard University's first African-American faculty member, where he served for 19 years. Grant is also famous for his invention of the oblate palate, which is a prosthetic device he developed for the treatment of the cleft palate. He was a founding member and later the president of the Harvard Odontological Society and was a member of the Harvard Dental Alumni Association. Grant was elected president of the Alumni Association in 1881. He died on August 21, 1910 at his vacation home in Chester, New Hampshire of liver disease.
George Franklin Grant, 1847-1910". Harvard. Retrieved 2007-05-24. "Dr. George Franklin Grant (1847-1910) of Oswego, New York, received a degree from the Harvard Dental School in 1870 and then joined the faculty as an authority on mechanical dentistry. He was the first African-American faculty member at the university and remembered today for his invention and patenting of the golf tee."
New York Times. Retrieved 2007-06-21. "He was born on September 15, 1846 in the small town of Oswego, New York, and he was one of seven children born to Phillis Pitt and Tudor Elandor Grant."
The Post-Standard. Retrieved 2007-06-21. "George Franklin Grant is the only one of Tudor E. Grant's four children who left much of a historical trail, but it's an intriguing one, notably for an invention used by millions of golfers. Born in 1847 in Oswego to Tudor and Phillis Pitt Grant, he was educated in Oswego but apparently left home at age 15 after an argument with his father over his taste in clothes. He went to work for an Oswego dentist named S.A. Smith, toiling in a laboratory for five years, according to a Boston Public Library document."
Taylor, Erica. "Little-Known Black History Fact: The Bordentown School", BlackAmericaWeb.com, May 13, 2010. Accessed June 6, 2010.
McDaniel, Pete (2000). "Birth of the tee: The story behind the man who gave the ball the perfect setup - George Franklin Grant, inventor". Bnet. Retrieved 2007-05-24. "Grant was born in 1846 in Oswego, N.Y. Unlike many modern-day heroes, his contribution to the game was through ingenuity and resourcefulness rather than playing ability. Grant received a patent for the golf tee in 1899. His was the blueprint for today's wooden and plastic tees. He owned the first patent, but it took almost a century to receive recognition for his invention."
http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/inventions/tee.asp
While the turn of the 19th-20th century saw many tee inventions of various forms and materials, none of these novelties grew popular enough to threaten the centuries-old tradition of the sand tee. That situation began to change in the early 1920s, when New Jersey dentist William Lowell patented and sold a tee that would eventually become standard: the familiar one-piece wooden peg with a funnel-shaped head. The "Reddy Tee," as Lowell called it, was easy and cheap to mass produce, but most important to its success was Lowell's aggressive marketing campaign, which included hiring golf great Walter Hagen to show off the tees while touring.
Because of the Reddy Tee's unprecedented acceptance at both the professional and amateur levels, Lowell was for some time assumed to have been the inventor of the golf tee. More recently it has become fashionable, especially during Black History Month, to give George Grant the credit. Few people are aware of the tees preceding both Grant's and Lowell's, and as of this writing, scant reference to them can be found elsewhere on the Web. For a reasonably complete history, find the bookSingular History of the Golf Tee by Irwin R. Valenta (Greensboro, N.C. : I.R. Valenta, c1995).
William Lowell, Sr. (1863 – June 24, 1954) was a dentist, and an inventor of a wooden golf tee.[1]
William Lowell was born in Hoboken, New Jersey and lived in Maplewood, New Jersey and had a son, William Lowell, Jr. (1897-1976).[2] He first made 5,000 tees, that were stained green, but he soon changed to red, to make them more distinctive and named them "Reddy Tees". In 1922 Walter Hagenand Joe Kirkwood used his tees during their exhibitions. The Reddy Tee was patented on May 13, 1925, but in 1922 he signed a deal with the A.G. SpaldingCompany, for 24 dozen. By 1925 he was selling $100,000 worth of tees and they were being made of celluloid. By 1926 copycat versions were on the market, and he spent much of his time and money fighting patent infringement.
He died at Orange Memorial Hospital in East Orange, New Jersey on June 24, 1954 at the age of 91.
U.S. Patent 1,670,627 golf tee filed December 7, 1925
U.S. Patent 1,650,141 golf tee filed August 26, 1925
U.S. Patent 1,569,765 gold putter filed November 13, 1925
Birth: 1863
Hoboken
Hudson County
New Jersey, USA
Death: Jun. 24, 1954
William Lowell, Sr. (1863 – June 24, 1954) was a dentist, and an inventor of a wooden golf tee.
William Lowell was born in Hoboken, New Jersey and lived in Maplewood, New Jersey and had a son, William Lowell, Jr. (1897-1976). He first made 5,000 tees, that were stained green, but he soon changed to red, to make them more distinctive and named them "Reddy Tees". In 1922 Walter Hagen and Joe Kirkwood used his tees during their exhibitions. The Reddy Tee was patented on May 13, 1925, but in 1922 he signed a deal with the A.G. Spalding Company, for 24 dozen. By 1925 he was selling $100,000 worth of tees and they were being made of celluloid. By 1926 copycat versions were on the market, and he spent much of his time and money fighting patent infringement. He died in East Orange, New Jersey in 1954 at the age of 91.
Burial:
Saint Peter's Cemetery
Jersey City
Hudson County
New Jersey, USA
Created by: Richard Arthur Norton (1...
Record added: Nov 23, 2010
Find A Grave Memorial# 62081702
McDaniel, Pete (2000). "Birth of the tee: The story behind the man who gave the ball the perfect setup - George Franklin Grant, inventor". Golf Digest. Retrieved 2007-05-24. "Ten years later, the messy, wet sand tee was still in vogue when Dr. William Lowell, a Maplewood, N.J., dentist, made the late-in-life discovery that golf possessed certain therapeutic advantages. ..."
New York Times. May 14, 1976. Retrieved 2007-05-24. "William Lowell Jr., a former manufacturer of golf tees and an industrial packaging specialist, died Wednesday at Muhlenberg Hospital,Plainfield, New Jersey He was 78 years old and lived in Fanwood, New Jersey"
New York Times. June 25, 1954. Retrieved 2010-11-24. "Dr. William Lowell, designer of the Reddy Golf Tee, which came into universal use in the sport, died yesterday at Orange Memorial Hospital after a short ..."
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