Originally published in The Vidette-Messenger of Porter County on December 20, 1945.
TELEVISION, SUPERHIGHWAYS AND MR. AMSTUTZ
A man, the book says, is as young as he feels. If the vigor of an individual’s creative imagination and persistence of his faith in the future are criteria our nomination goes to Noah S. Amstutz as the youngest man in town.
Recently Casper W. Ooms, U.S. commissioner of patents, made a speech in New York from which we want to quote. “Recently,” Ooms, “an elderly gentleman, vigorous in his eighties, came to see me and announced himself as Noah Amstutz of Valparaiso, Ind., patent attorney. ‘Valparaiso,’ I said to him, ‘brings two things to mind. When I was a boy my father drove a single-cylinder Cadillac. We frequently drove to Valparaiso for lunch. We could just make it from the south end of Chicago in half a day, what with changing two tires on the way, eating luncheon, and returning in the afternoon.’ Then, I added, ‘There is a set of telegraph instruments in the Smithsonian Institution, but a man in Valparaiso sent a picture thirty miles by telegraph in 1891. Do you happen to know anything about that?”
“Amstutz beamed. ‘Those are my instruments,’ he said. ‘I gave them to the Smithsonian. Did you ever hear of my two-way television in 1895?’
“I admitted that I hadn’t and he offered to bring me the documents. A few days later I went through the voluminous scrapbook of this inventor, working on a facsimile transmission and television in the early 1890’s. His instruments were marvels of workmanship. His television circuit, I am convinced, with more delicate photoelectric pickups than were available to him, and some means of synchronizing his sending with his receiving instruments, would have worked. Here were years of labor spent a generation before these concepts were recognized by commercial development.”
The patent commissioner was using the example of the local inventor simply to illustrate the value of patents.
We would like to point out, however, that Noah Amstutz, who experimented with television a generation before the public had heard the word, now has another project. He is laboring diligently on behalf of the construction of six superhighways across the nation, east to west, north to south. It sounds like a gigantic, hopeless dream. But it is not nearly so sounded to the average man in 1895.
It is fortunate for the nation that America does have men of vision who at the same time possess the fortitude to persist in the face of opposition or worse, apathy. They are this country’s “young” men.
