Sybilla Righton Masters

The first patent holder in American history was Thomas Masters. However, the inventions for which he received his patents were invented by his wife, Sybilla. Sadly, little is known about “the mother of American inventors” other than the circumstances surrounding her inventions.

Masters was born Sybilla Righton. Nothing is known for sure about the circumstances of her birth, but evidence strongly suggests that she was born during the late 1670s on the island of Bermuda, from where her parents emigrated to the North American mainland. Her father, William, was a mariner and merchant, and her mother, Sarah, was a homemaker. In 1687 her family was living on a farm near Burlington in the British colony of West Jersey. Between 1693 and 1696 she married Thomas Masters, a Philadelphia merchant with whom she had four children.

Between the time of her marriage and 1712, Masters developed two patentable ideas. The first was a way for “Cleaning and Curing the Indian Corn Growing in the severall Colonies in America.” At the time, English settlers living in the New World ground their corn into meal by placing it between two millstones. One stone turned round and round while the other remained stationary, in the process grinding the corn into meal. Masters’s process evidently imitated the Native American way of refining corn into what was known as Tuscarora rice by putting it into a tall bowl known as a mortar and pounding it with a long club known as a pestle. Masters modified the Indian process by making it mechanical. She mounted a row of pestles to a long cylinder that could be connected to either a waterwheel or a horse. As the cylinder rotated back and forth, it drove the pestles up and down in a row of mortars.

Her other invention was a way to make hats and bonnets by weaving together straw and palmetto
leaves, which grew plentifully throughout the Caribbean and the southernmost mainland colonies.
In 1712 Masters went to London, England, to obtain patents for her two inventions. Since all English patents at that time were granted personally by the English monarch, Masters spent several years convincing a seemingly endless stream of government officials to give her an audience with King George I. Another problem was that English law prohibited patents from being issued to women, but Masters got around this law by asking for the patents in her husband’s name. She finally succeeded in 1715, when Thomas Masters was issued a patent for the corn refining machine; however, the patent clearly indicates that the refiner’s inventor was Sybilla Masters. In 1716 Thomas Masters was issued another patent for the weaving process; this patent also acknowledges Sybilla Masters as the inventor. These two patents are the first ones known to have been issued to an inventor living in America.

Unlike many inventors, Sybilla Masters profited from her inventions. In 1714 her husband had purchased a mill in Philadelphia, and for years he processed cornmeal via his wife’s process. He also obtained an English monopoly on the Caribbean palmetto-leaf trade, and before Sybilla Masters returned to Philadelphia, where she died on August 23, 1720, she opened a shop in London that sold
straw-palmetto hats, bonnets, and baskets.