Colonial Mom Became America's First Woman Patent Inventor

A Philadelphia mother of four watched Indigenous communities pound corn with wooden pestles and saw the future of American innovation.

Sybilla Righton Masters faced a problem every colonist knew in the early 1700s. European grain mills couldn't properly process maize, the New World staple that fed the colonies.

Born around 1676 in West Jersey, Masters married merchant Thomas Masters in the early 1690s and moved to Philadelphia. After studying how Native Americans processed corn, she invented a machine using water-powered mallets to pound kernels into hominy meal, similar to what we call grits today.

But Pennsylvania was too young to issue patents. So in 1712, Masters did something extraordinary: she boarded a ship and crossed the Atlantic Ocean alone.

"I have been at great trouble and expense, and have ventured my life across the seas," she wrote in her 1713 patent application. "I have left my country, my family and all the comforts of life for the good of the public."

The legal system of the time wouldn't let married women hold patents in their own names. When Patent No. 401 was granted in 1715, it listed Thomas Masters as the inventor, but specified the machine had been "found out by Sybilla, his wife."

That technicality couldn't diminish her achievement. Historians recognize Masters as the first American colonist to secure an English patent.

Masters wasn't done innovating. While in London, she opened a shop selling hats and bonnets made from palmetto leaves and straw using her own weaving technique. In 1716, she secured a second patent for the process, again under her husband's name.

Why This Inspires

Masters showed what determination and observation could accomplish three centuries ago. She studied Indigenous techniques, engineered a solution, crossed an ocean despite the danger, navigated legal barriers that denied her recognition, and still succeeded in bringing her inventions to market.

When she returned to Philadelphia in 1716, her corn-processing technology was installed in a mill her husband established. Though the product never sold well in England, it found success in the colonies where people needed it most.

Her journey from observation to innovation to commercialization secured her rightful place as a pioneer of American invention.