The first golf tee patent.

Ten years before Grant, two Scots filed the original.

What actually came first

Most American sources will tell you Dr. George F. Grant invented the golf tee in 1899. He did patent the first American golf tee that year. But the first patented golf tee in any country came from Scotland in 1889, ten years earlier, from two men named William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas.

Why the Scottish tee did not catch on

The Bloxsom-Douglas design was less commercially viable than what Grant came up with a decade later. There was no Walter Hagen to popularize it, no Spalding contract to mass-produce it, and the Scottish patent did not translate into widespread use. The shape we recognize today still came from William Lowell's 1925 Reddy Tee.

Why the record matters

The history of the golf tee is one of the most quietly multinational stories in equipment. The game traveled from Scotland to America in the late 1800s. The tee made the same trip the other way around. Two Scots filed first; one American made it real; one moon landing made it iconic; one Los Angeles printer is trying to make it modern. Each one stood on the one before.

Sources

The 1889 Bloxsom-Douglas patent is referenced by the Scottish Golf History archive. Grant's 1899 US Patent No. 638,920 is in Google Patents. Lowell's 1925 patent is in the Wikipedia entry on William Lowell Sr.