The peg tee was not invented by one person in one moment. Two Scotsmen, William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas, patented a rubber tee in 1889; ten years later, in 1899, Boston dentist Dr George Franklin Grant patented the wooden peg design golfers know today, though it took William Lowell’s marketing in the 1920s, putting the peg in the hands of professionals such as Walter Hagen, to make it an everyday item.
We are Links & Oak, and we make engraving-style golf artwork. One of our plates, “The Quiet Before the Drive”, shows the moment just before a player swings from the tee, which set us wondering how that little peg got there. Here is what the records support, and where they run out.
Before the peg: sand, water and a caddie’s thumb
The word “tee” is older than the peg, and it did not mean a peg at all. In the earliest surviving rules of the game, the thirteen articles drawn up in 1744 for the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers at Leith, the tee is a place. The first article says you must tee your ball within a club’s length of the hole you have just played. The second says your tee must be upon the ground. There is no equipment in either rule. The tee was a spot, and where the ball sat on it was up to the player.
What golfers did in practice is well described in later golf writing. They took a pinch of damp sand or earth and built a little mound, then set the ball on top. Many courses kept a box of sand near each teeing ground for the purpose, and the caddie, or sometimes the player, did the shaping by hand. Wet the sand, press it into a cone, balance the ball. Then, after the drive, you walked off with a sandy thumb and forefinger.
The method had real limits. The mound was rarely the same twice. In a wind it crumbled. In wet weather the sand went to paste, and in frost the ground could hardly be worked at all. Anyone who has tried to make a decent sandcastle turret will understand how much patience a single drive could take. Nobody quite knows where the word itself comes from. Several origins have been suggested, including a Scots word for the small heap, but we have not found a source firm enough to state one as fact, so we will leave it as an open question.
It is worth saying that this was not a hardship anyone complained about loudly. The sand tee was simply how golf was played, and the rules were happy with it. A player’s business was to hit the ball where it lay, and the teeing ground was the one place where you were allowed to improve the lie by building it. The mound was part of the ritual. It also gave a small, quiet pause before the biggest shot of the hole, which is exactly the pause our plate is about.
Who invented the golf tee?
When someone finally tried to replace the sand mound, they did not start with wood. The earliest patented tees we can point to were rubber. In 1889 two Scotsmen, William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas, took out a patent for a rubber tee, a small cup that sat in the ground and held the ball off the turf. Accounts of the fine detail differ from one telling to the next, so we would not claim more than that: a patent, the year, the two names and the material. It is a useful reminder that the idea of a manufactured tee is older than the twentieth century, and older than the wooden peg most of us picture.
The wooden peg has its own documented moment. On 12 December 1899, a Boston dentist named Dr George Franklin Grant was granted a United States patent for a wooden golf tee. Grant was one of the earliest Black graduates of Harvard’s dental school, and he was also a keen golfer. By the accounts we have seen, he made the tees for his own use and gave them to friends rather than selling them, and never put them on the market. The patent exists. The commercial success does not.
That is the first thing to be careful about, because a lot of tidy summaries call Grant “the inventor of the golf tee” full stop. The patent record does not support that. The rubber tee of 1889 came first, and the humble sand mound came centuries before it. What the record does support is that Grant patented a wooden peg tee in 1899, and that for decades his name was left out of the story. It was only in 1991 that the United States Golf Association recognised him, long after his death in 1910, as the holder of the earliest patent for a wooden tee.
Which brings us to the man whose name does appear in most histories of the modern tee. William Lowell, a dentist from New Jersey (dentistry crops up more often in this story than you might expect), developed a wooden tee in the early 1920s with a slightly concave head to cradle the ball and a taper to sit in the ground. He painted it red, partly, the story goes, so that it could be found again in the grass, and the name he gave it was a play on the word ready. Where the sources agree is on how he sold it. Lowell reportedly persuaded well known professionals, among them Walter Hagen and Joe Kirkwood, to use his tee in public play, so that spectators saw the best players in the game teeing up with a peg. That was the marketing. It was not a technical breakthrough so much as a very good demonstration.
Why did it take so long for golfers to switch to tees?
If the peg tee was patented in 1899 and marketed in the 1920s, why did it take so long to become the ordinary thing? The records do not give one clean answer, so here is what we can reasonably say, and where we are reasoning rather than quoting.
First, the sand tee worked well enough. It cost nothing. It was already sitting in a box by the teeing ground. A new gadget has to beat something that is free and familiar, and in 1899 the average golfer had little reason to believe a bit of turned wood would improve the drive.
Second, golf was strongly attached to tradition. It was a game with rules, clubs and customs that had been handed down, and equipment that changed the feel of the game was often looked at sideways. A tee is not a club, but a player who reached for a peg while his playing partners shaped a sand cone could expect a raised eyebrow. We are inferring that from the general character of the sport rather than from a single named quotation, so treat it as context, not proof.
Third, and this one we can put more weight on, Grant’s tee never got a sales push, and the early rubber tees were not, on the evidence, taken up widely. It was Lowell’s decision to put a peg into the hands of famous players that moved it from a curiosity to a habit. Seeing is believing, and a tee that Hagen used was a tee a club golfer would try.
There is a practical reason, too, that the wooden peg won out over the rubber cup and the sand. It is light, cheap, easy to make in bulk, and it lets the clubhead meet the ball with little in the way. It also leaves nothing behind but a small hole. A player can carry a pocketful, lose one in the rough without a second thought, and take out a new one from the bag on the next tee. That is a good deal of convenience from a small piece of wood.
So the story is not a single flash of invention. It is a slow sequence: a tee that was only a place in 1744, a rubber tee patented in 1889, a wooden peg patented in 1899 that most players never saw, and a tee promoted by the best golfers of the 1920s. By the time the peg took over, the sand box was on its way out, and a job that had once belonged to the caddie’s hands now belonged to the player’s pocket.
A note on the myths, because they crop up. You may read that golfers universally adopted the peg the moment it appeared, or that a single named person invented the tee from nothing. Neither is supported by the patents, the early rule books or the histories we have looked at. The truer picture is messier and, we think, more interesting.
The plate, and what it is
“The Quiet Before the Drive” is our engraving-style plate of a golfer on the tee, at the point where everything is settled and nothing has been hit. It is digital artwork made in the manner of an old engraving. It is not an antique, it is not hand-engraved, and it does not show any real named course. What it shows is a feeling we think every golfer knows: the still moment when the ball is set up, the wind is checked, and the swing has not yet begun.
In the days of the sand tee that moment included a small practical act, a wet handful of sand shaped into a cone. Today it includes a peg pushed in to the depth you prefer. The ritual has changed and the pause has not. If you like the idea of that pause on a shirt, the plate is waiting for you below.
See it in the collection: The The Quiet Before the Drive design
