The Harvard Dentist Who Invented the Golf Tee — And Never Got Credit for It

Before we talk about what a golf tee is made of in 2026, we need to talk about the man who invented it in 1899.

Because the story of the golf tee is not the story most golfers have heard. It's not a simple story of a practical invention by a practical person. It's the story of a man born to formerly enslaved parents in upstate New York who rose to become the first Black professor at Harvard University, a pioneering surgeon who changed how cleft palates were treated, a passionate golfer who built his own course in a meadow beside his house — and who, one December morning in 1899, received US Patent No. 638,920 for a device that every golfer on earth would eventually use.

And then died without credit for it.

This is the story of Dr. George Franklin Grant. And it deserves to be told properly.

Born Into a World Trying to Hold Him Back

The son of formerly enslaved parents, Grant was born in Oswego, New York, in 1846. His father, Tudor Elandor Grant, had escaped bondage in Maryland and made his way north, eventually becoming a prominent barber in Oswego. Having experienced the evils of slavery firsthand, he became an ardent abolitionist, smuggling slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad.

George Grant grew up in a household shaped by the memory of what his parents had survived and the fierce determination that their children would not. Grant and his siblings had the advantage of attending a school where Black and white children were "equally admitted." In an America still reconstructing itself after the Civil War, that sentence alone tells you something about the family environment that shaped him.

His first taste of dentistry was at age 15 when he was hired to run errands for a local dentist and soon became his laboratory assistant. Grant learned the basics of dental practice for five years and in 1867, at the age of 21, he moved to Boston.

Boston in 1867 was a city of possibility and contradiction — a center of abolitionist energy, home to a community of free Black Americans building new lives, and also a place whose major institutions remained largely closed to those same people. Grant arrived there with five years of practical dental experience, a burning ambition, and nothing else. He boarded with John J. Smith, a prominent Black abolitionist on Beacon Hill — and found himself living within walking distance of the newly established Harvard Dental School.

That proximity would change everything.

Harvard — Where He Earned Every Step

Harvard Dental School, founded in 1867, was located nearby where Massachusetts General Hospital stands today. Grant's early dental experience got him in the door of the School and he was initially hired as a laboratory assistant. He was invited to attend the School and matriculated the following year.

In 1870, Grant graduated with honors, setting the stage for a remarkable career that would fuse his passion for dentistry with his spirit of innovation. He became the second African American to graduate from Harvard Dental School.

But graduating was only the beginning.

In 1870, he graduated with distinction and was subsequently hired as an assistant in the Department of Mechanical Dentistry in 1871. In 1884, he was elevated to the post of instructor in Treatment for Cleft Palate and Cognate Diseases, a faculty appointment, which made Grant the first Black professor at Harvard University and the nation's first Black faculty member in dental education.

Read that slowly. The first Black professor at Harvard University. Not at Harvard Dental School — at Harvard, period. In 1884. Seventeen years after arriving in Boston with nothing but determination and a dental apprenticeship to his name.

The Surgeon Who Changed Faces

Before the golf tee, before the patent, before any of the history most people associate with his name — Dr. George Grant was a surgeon.

His specialty was the treatment of cleft palates — the congenital condition affecting the roof of the mouth and lip that, in the 19th century, left patients with profound difficulties speaking, eating, and living in a society that often responded to visible difference with cruelty rather than compassion. The surgical and prosthetic correction of cleft palates was among the most delicate and consequential work a dentist-surgeon of that era could undertake.

Following his professorship, Dr. Grant opened a successful dental practice and became widely respected for his work repairing cleft palates. His patients weren't abstractions. They were people who came to him unable to speak clearly, unable to eat without difficulty, carrying the psychological weight of a difference that the world had never let them forget. What Grant gave them — through precision, through skill, through genuine care — was function. Sometimes it was transformation.

This was the foundation of Dr. George Grant's professional life. Not the golf tee. The patients. The practice. The teaching. The surgery that gave people their voices back.

The golf tee was something he made because a game he loved had an annoying problem.

The Problem on the First Tee

Prior to the invention of the wooden tee at the turn of the 19th century, golfers made tees out of sand. Courses would supply each hole with a box of wet sand from which the golfer would fashion a raised mound using either his hands or a cone-shaped mold.

Picture it: eighteen times a round, you crouch down, reach into a box of wet sand, and pinch and mold a small cone by hand before you can take your first shot. In the rain. In the heat. In the cold. Eighteen times, every round, for every golfer who ever played the game from its origins through the end of the 19th century.

Dr. Grant played golf in a meadow near his home in Arlington, Mass. His daughter, Frances, recalled caddying for her father in the 1880s in the Boston suburb of Arlington Heights, where her father had built a meadow course next to his home in the country. He loved the game with the same intensity he brought to everything else in his life. And the sand-mounding ritual frustrated him with the same intensity.

He was unhappy with the imprecise, messy, and unsanitary process of teeing up the ball, which required pinching moist sand to fashion a coned-shaped tee. Searching for a better method, Grant came up with an invention that would forever change the game of golf.

US Patent No. 638,920

On December 12, 1899, he received U.S. patent No. 638,920, the first patent for a wooden golf tee.

The design was elegant in its simplicity — described as having a "tapering portion [usually wood] to be driven in the ground first, and a flexible tubular head [usually rubber], the lower end of which embraces the upper portion of the base." A pointed stake to anchor it in the ground. A flexible rubber cup at the top to cradle the ball. Clean, hygienic, reusable, consistent.

Every golfer who has ever teed up a ball in the 125 years since has used some variation of this principle. The geometry Dr. Grant described in that patent in 1899 is the geometry of every tee produced in every factory in every country on earth today.

And then he gave them away.

Grant was an inventor, not a businessman, and never marketed his golfing innovation. He gave some of the tees to friends and playing partners. He had no interest in commercial enterprise — his hands were full with his practice, his patients, and his teaching at Harvard. The tee was a solution to a problem he had solved. That was enough.

When Grant died of liver disease in 1910, the invention passed with him.

The Erasure — And the Eventual Recognition

What happened after Grant's death is a story that belongs to a pattern larger than golf.

In 1991, GolfDigest published an article that suggested Dr. William Lowell, a white dentist, invented the modern golf tee 21 years later in 1924. Lowell had patented a similar tee, painted them red, named them the Reddy Tee, and — crucially — marketed them successfully by paying champion golfers to use them in exhibition matches. He built a business. Grant had not. So Lowell's name entered the popular history of the game, and Grant's didn't.

Dr. Reed goes on to explain that Dr. Grant was not given his due in golf's top publication, illustrative of the many difficulties that persist in maintaining accuracy and visibility in the historical record when it comes to African Americans. The investigation reveals how it happened that Dr. Grant's name was bypassed: quite simply, Dr. Lowell was able to market his tee, whereas Dr. Grant did not wish to do so and would most likely have been blocked from doing so if he had tried. What this history reflects is the problems that Black people have often had in American society stemming from a lack of equal access to mainstream industry and commerce.

More than 80 years later, in 1991, the United States Golf Association recognized Grant for his contribution to the game.

In 2023, Harvard School of Dental Medicine commissioned a portrait of Dr. George Franklin Grant — the creator of a prosthetic for cleft palates, inventor of the wooden golf tee, and the first Black faculty member at the University. It now hangs in the institution's halls, telling the story they should have been telling all along.

What Dr. Grant's Invention Became

The wooden tee that Grant patented in 1899 was a revolution in its time. It eliminated a messy, inconsistent ritual. It standardized the setup for every tee shot. It gave golfers a repeatable, hygienic foundation for the most important stroke in the game.

For 125 years, wood was the material. Simple, cheap, plentiful, disposable. Golfers snapped them, lost them, grabbed new ones from the bucket at the pro shop without thinking twice. The tee became so standardized, so commodified, so thoroughly normalized as a throwaway item that nobody questioned whether it could be better.

Nobody, that is, until someone applied the same spirit Dr. Grant brought to that meadow in Arlington Heights — the spirit that says this problem has a better solution, and I'm going to find it.

125 Years Later: Carbon Fiber Takes the Tee Box

Dr. Grant solved the problem of his era. He replaced wet sand with a precision-crafted wooden spike and rubber cup. He gave golfers consistency where there had been chaos.

The problem of our era is different. The wooden tee is consistent enough — but it's not engineered. It snaps. It varies in density and grain. It deflects at impact in ways that introduce micro-variables into the most important shot of every hole. And it ends up in landfills by the billion, every year, across every golf course on earth.

Dreaming3D's 3D Printed Carbon Fiber Golf Tees are what Dr. Grant's original insight becomes when you apply 2026 materials science to a 127-year-old design principle.

Carbon fiber PLA — polylactic acid reinforced throughout with carbon fiber strands — produces a tee that is stiffer than wood, lighter than plastic, and dimensionally precise in a way that hand-selected wooden pegs can never be. The 3D printing process means every tee in the 100-pack is geometrically identical — same height, same wall thickness, same structural properties. The consistency Dr. Grant was chasing when he replaced sand with wood, taken to its logical conclusion.

The manufacturing process is additive — layer by layer, precisely, to exact specification. The material is PLA-based — plant-derived, more environmentally considered than petroleum plastic. The tee is reusable across multiple rounds rather than snapped and discarded after a single drive.

In spirit, Dr. Grant would recognize what Dreaming3D has built. A golfer identified a problem with the standard solution. A better material and a more precise manufacturing process produced a better object. The improvement is specific, functional, and completely in the service of the game.

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The Legacy of a Man Who Changed Two Games

Dr. George Franklin Grant died on August 21, 1910. He was 64 years old. He left behind a dental practice that had changed the lives of hundreds of patients. A legacy of teaching at one of America's most prestigious institutions. A record of breaking barriers that nobody had broken before him. And a small wooden object that every golfer on earth eventually adopted without knowing his name.

He did not become famous for the tee. He didn't want to. He invented it because he was a problem-solver who encountered a problem and solved it — the same quality that made him an exceptional surgeon, an exceptional teacher, and an exceptional man.

The USGA finally recognized him in 1991. Harvard hung his portrait in 2023. Golf history is, slowly and belatedly, telling his story correctly.

What we owe Dr. George Grant isn't reverence. It's the same thing he always gave his work: honesty, precision, and the refusal to accept that the existing solution is good enough when a better one is possible.

He'd approve of carbon fiber. We're fairly certain of it.

Quick Facts: Dr. George Franklin Grant

Honor His Legacy — Tee Up With Precision

Dr. Grant spent his life improving things — including the piece of equipment at the foundation of every tee shot in golf. The least we can do is continue that tradition.

Shop 3D Printed Carbon Fiber Golf Tees at Dreaming3D

100 tees per pack. Regulation 3.25". Carbon fiber PLA, Wood PLA, and Plastic options. Five-point quality inspection. Ships worldwide from San Diego.

📞 858-342-6984 | 🌐 dreaming3d.net

Share this story with a golfer who doesn't know it yet. Dr. Grant's name belongs in every conversation about the game he helped make better.