The Defiant Roger Babson and His Battle with an Insurmountable Force (11 photos)
For the vast majority of people, gravity was simply an immutable law of nature, an eternal given with all its inconveniences. But not for Roger Babson. 
This successful American businessman and economist was not accustomed to submitting to circumstances, even on a cosmic scale. 
Roger Babson
Roger Babson, born in 1875 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After receiving an engineering degree, he founded a securities analysis and investment management firm. Within ten years, he became a multimillionaire. His investment acumen earned him a fortune and a reputation as the leading economist of his time. 
In the late 1600s, Isaac Newton witnessed an apple fall from a tree, which inspired him to develop the law of universal gravitation.
He authored over forty books on economics and social issues, and the Babson College he founded in Wellesley remains one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the field of entrepreneurship. 
Babson attributed his financial success to principles he gleaned from Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation and the law of action and reaction. He believed that Newton's laws governed not only the motion of celestial bodies but also the dynamics of the stock market. His famous dictum, "What goes up must come down," and his prediction that "the market will collapse under its own weight," came true in October 1929. Babson was one of the few who foresaw the crash and the ensuing Great Depression. 
Babson's obsession with gravity dated back to his childhood. In his essay "Gravity: Public Enemy Number One," he recalled the drowning of his sister, a tragedy he blamed solely on gravity. "She was unable to fight gravity, which pounced on her like a dragon and dragged her to the bottom. There she suffocated," he wrote. 
His feud with the fundamental force of the universe became a personal crusade after the drowning of his grandson in 1947. A year later, Roger Babson founded the Gravity Research Foundation with the goal of finding ways to control and even overcome gravity. To stimulate scientific interest, the foundation began holding annual essay contests with cash prizes. 
Monument to the Gravity Research Foundation at Tufts University
Initially, Babson openly stated that he was searching for ideas for antigravity devices, but after meeting a cool reception from the scientific community, he reformulated the foundation's goals as fundamental research into the nature of gravity. 
Nobel laureate George Smoot
This strategy bore fruit. The essay competition eventually attracted some of the century's brightest minds, including Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Nobel laureate George Smoot. At least five of the participants subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics. 
One of the 13 antigravity monuments is located near the John O. Grose Science Building at Bethune-Cookman University.
In the 1960s, the foundation donated granite monoliths to thirteen US universities, reminders of the future benefits of discovering control of gravity. Many grants remained unclaimed for years due to the specific conditions, but Tufts University put the funds to good use by founding the Institute of Cosmology. As its director noted, the institute's research, dedicated to the repulsive gravity of a false vacuum, is essentially work on antigravity, which would have been a prime example for Babson himself to endorse. 
Today, when a graduate receives a doctorate from this institute, they participate in a special ritual at that very stone. They kneel, and their supervisor drops an apple on their head, in the hope that this will awaken in the newly minted scientist a Newtonian inspiration. Thus, the legacy of the man who declared war on gravity continues to nourish the science he sought to transform. 
