Masters, Sybilla (1676?-1720), may have been the first female inventor in the American Colonies. Masters invented a corn mill, a machine to crush and grind dried kernels of corn. She became one of the earliest Americans to earn a patent.
Little is known about Masters’s early life. Her name at birth was Sybilla Righton. She may have been born in Bermuda. Her birth date is unknown. But records show her family living in New Jersey by 1692. The young woman testified as a witness for her father in a New Jersey court that year. Around 1695, she married Thomas Masters. He was a wealthy, influential Quaker merchant and future mayor of Philadelphia.
American colonists often ate food made by grinding corn into cornmeal between two big millstones and then cooking it. Masters’s invention, by contrast, pounded corn with hammers powered by wooden gears in mills. She may have gotten the idea from Native American women who pounded corn with wooden posts.
Before the American Revolution (1775-1783), inventors in Pennsylvania could not win full patent protection from the colony’s legal system. Thus in 1712, Masters sailed to London to apply for a British patent on her corn mill design. Women at the time could not hold patents. So she applied using her husband’s name. In 1715, English courts awarded Thomas Masters a patent for processes of “cleaning and curing Indian corn.” The patent described the device as “a new invention found out by Sybilla, his wife.”
While waiting for her corn mill patent, Sybilla developed ways to weave straw and palmetto leaves. She opened a London store and sold hats and furniture covers made with this process. In 1716, she received a patent for the weaving process, again under her husband’s name. With her two patents in hand, Sybilla returned to the colonies. She died on Aug. 23, 1720.
