Frederic H. Betts

Frederic Henry Betts was an acknowledged leader in this country in the complicated and difficult branch of his profession, to which he especially devoted himself, patent law. Born in Newburgh in 1843, of an old New England family, he graduated from Yale in 1864, and from Columbia Law School two years later. For some years after 1872 he was counsel to the State Insurance Department, but his chief work was in the law of patents. He was counsel in the most important cases growing out of the application of electricity for the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Bell Telephone, the Edison, the General and the Westinghouse Electric Companies, and finally the Marconi Wireless systems in England and in this country. He was a lecturer on patent law in Yale University, from which he received the degree of LL.D., and founded the Betts Prize in the Yale Law School. For a quarter of a century, Mr. Betts was a vestryman of St. George’s Church, and a warden of St. Andrews-on-the-Dunes at Southampton, which was given to the parish by himself and his brother. He took an active and always creditable part in politics, not only in the organization of the Republican party, to which he was attached, but in reform movements such as that of the Committee of Fifty in 1882, the Citizens’ Committee of One Hundred in 1890, the People’s Municipal League, and the City Club. Mr. Betts was a gentleman of unusual culture, and had a large circle of friends in The Century, of which he had been a member for nearly thirty years.

Edward Cary
1906 Century Association Yearbook