America at 250: The Revolutionary Spark
A Smithsonian magazine special report
When Patent Protections Couldn’t Keep Pace With Ingenuity in the Colonies, One Inventive Woman Took Her Case to Britain
Sybilla Righton Masters devised a novel way to work with grains available to her in Philadelphia. A long journey led to the first patent issued to an American (though it went to her husband)
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In the late 17th century, colonists in North America faced a new problem: how to process maize, a New World staple, using mills designed for softer European grains. Sybilla Righton Masters, a Philadelphia mother of four, devised a solution. Born circa 1676 and raised in Burlington Township, West Jersey, Sybilla married the prosperous merchant Thomas Masters in the early 1690s and moved to Philadelphia. After observing the way Indigenous communities pounded maize with wooden pestles, she conceived a machine that produced coarse kernels used for making hominy meal—a staple at the time, and similar to what we now call grits.
While some Colonies granted exclusive privileges for inventions, Pennsylvania was still young and did not yet issue patents, so Masters set sail for Britain in 1712 to seek legal protection for her design. “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 your comforts of life for the good of the public.”Did you know? A fashion entrepreneur
Sybilla Righton Masters wasn’t just an inventor—she was also a fashion entrepreneur. In 1716, she obtained a further patent, also under her husband's name, for a method of making novel hats from palmetto leaves. From a shop she opened in London, she sold the hats to some fanfare before she and her husband returned to the States .
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Married women could not legally hold patents in their own name, neither in the Colonies nor in England, so Masters’ patent was issued to her husband in 1715, specifying that the invention had been “found out by Sybilla, his wife.” Historians consider her the first American colonist to secure an English patent—despite the legal hurdles.
While in London, Sybilla opened a shop selling hats and bonnets made using a second innovation: a method for preparing and weaving fibers from plants such as straw and palmetto. In 1716, Patent No. 403 was issued to Thomas for the weaving process.
The same year, Masters returned to Philadelphia, where her corn-processing technology was used at a mill established by her husband. Although the product never sold well in England, it found some success in the Colonies.
More significant was Masters’ progression from observation to innovation and commercialization—securing her a place in the canon of American invention.
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This article is a selection from the Summer 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine