American faculty member almost nobody from Grant's

Golf tees were originally fashioned from nature, using either sod or sand. George Franklin Grant didnot invent the golf tee.In 1899, Grant - a dentist of some import and the first African-American faculty member at Harvard - received a patent for "an improved golf tee" from the United States Patent Office. Grant's tee was a wooden peg that the golfer pushed into the ground, and atop which he balanced the golf ball.
who is generally credited with inventing the modern golf tee: George Franklin Grant.Grant's tee, in fact, did not provide the template for the modern tee. It had a different shape, too, and almost nobody from Grant's era saw it. But because it had the "big three" elements that almost all tees of the early 20th century included - wood, pierced the ground, peg atop which the ball sat - Grant earned his recognition from the USGA.
In 1991, the United States Golf Association recognized Grant as the inventor of the modern, wooden, peg golf tee - not the inventor of the golf tee itself, but of the specific type of tee that became the standard over ensuing decades. The fact is, nobody knows what the first artificial (as opposed to sod or sand) tee was, or who made it. So the inventor of the very first manmade golf tee is, and likely always will be, unknown.