Anti-Gravity, History, Rocks, Finance, and Genealogy

HERE AT NEW BOSTON, N.H.

ROGER W. BABSON

AND HIS ASSOCIATES

PIONEERED

IN ACTIVE RESEARCH

FOR ANTI-GRAVITY

AND A PARTIAL GRAVITY

INSULATOR

1959

This traffic island in the middle of New Boston, New Hampshire hides a secret! 

Under the plants and bushes is a monument to anti-gravity.  

I have been a fan of John J. Babson’s book The History of Gloucester, 1876, since it contains much genealogy information and historical stories about my ancestors.   In learning more about the Babson family, one of my favorite members has to be Roger Ward Babson (1875 – 1967).   He went to MIT, and worked for investment companies and invented Babson’s Statistical Organization in 1904.  His interest in business theory led him to found Babson College in Massachusetts, Webber College in Florida and the now gone Utopia College in Kansas.  He is famous for predicting the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression.  On September 5, 1929, just a few weeks before the crash he gave a speech “Sooner or later a crashing is coming, and it may be terrific.”

Roger Ward Babson was also an odd character; he founded the Gravity Research Foundation in 1948, convinced that science could learn to harness gravity.  They also experimented with theories on anti-gravity and gravity insulators.  He built a headquarters for this foundation in the little village of New Boston, New Hampshire because he was convinced it was far enough from civilization to survive a nuclear bomb in Boston, Massachusetts. The Gravity Research Foundation still exists, and it gives a prize every year for the best essay about gravity. Don’t laugh because Steven Hawking is one of the prize winners (see, he’s not just a character on The Big Bang Theory).

Another odd interest of Babson’s was the early settlement in Gloucester, Massachusetts known as Dogtown.  He hired stonecutters during the Great Depression to carve inspirational mottos on the boulders throughout Dogtown.  You can still walk through this area today and read the boulders which say things such as “Keep out of Debt”, “Help Mother” and “Prosperity follows service”, as well as marking the location of Dogtown Square and the cellar holes of colonial era homes.

A "Babson Boulder" at Dogtown, Gloucester, Massachusetts

There is a Babson Museum in West Gloucester dedicated to James Babson, the first Babson in Gloucester, Massachusetts who was a cooper.  The museum is a cooperage, built in 1658.   Roger Ward Babson is a distant cousin to me through his ROGERS and WHIPPLE ancestors.

I would love to photograph all these monuments to anti-gravity and gravity research, but as you can see below, someone has already done that.  Here is a list of all the colleges with the Anti-Gravity Monuments (none are the three colleges he founded, nor his Alma Mater the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): 

Colby College in Waterville, Maine

Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont

Keene State College in Keen, New Hampshire

Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts

Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts

Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts

We found this monument at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts

THIS MONUMENT HAS BEEN 

ERECTED 1964 BY THE

GRAVITY RESEARCH FOUNDATION

ROGER W. BABSON FOUNDER

IT IS TO REMIND STUDENTS

OF THE BLESSINGS FORTHCOMING

WHEN SCIENCE DETERMINES

WHAT GRAVITY IS, HOW IT WORKS

AND HOW IT MAY BE CONTROLLED

For the truly curious:

The Babson Historical Association http://babsonhistorical.org/  Museum, genealogy and other Babson information and Images, including the Babson Family Association and Reunion.

http://www.oddthingsiveseen.com/2010/03/anti-gravity-monuments.html      from the Odd Things I've Seen website, this is the post that got me driving around New England looking for these monuments.  There are photos of all the monuments at this page.

http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2012/06/stone-wall-stories-3-dogtown.html   my blog post about looking for the Babson Boulders in Dogtown, Gloucester, Massachusetts

http://cowhampshire.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/9/3/2208378.html   A blog post about Roger Ward Babson, from Jan Brown’s blog “Cow Hampshire”, it includes a genealogy of the Babson Family.

The Gravity Research Foundation http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org/
Try your luck at writing a prize winning essay on gravity, or anti-gravity, just like Stephen Hawking

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To cite/link to this blog post:   Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Anti-Gravity, History, Rocks, Finance, and Genealogy", Nutfield Genealogy, posted November 18, 2013, (  http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/anti-gravity-history-rocks-finance-and.html: accessed [access date]).