Heavy

This week I visited the University of Tampa, which was originally the Tampa Bay Hotel, now called Plant Hall, after Henry B. Plant, the sort of guy you call a railroad magnate. He seems like an interesting fellow, and I am sure I could go on about him at length, so I'll discuss him in the future, probably.

In the meantime, while walking around campus, I came across this stone:

courtesy Wikimedia Commons

It's hard to read in full, so I'll transcribe it:

THIS MONUMENT HAS BEEN
ERECTED 1965 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.

Gravity-- how does it work?

Roger Babson was a rich, mid-20th century eccentric; he made his money applying Newtonian principles to the stock market, founded three colleges, and ran for president in 1940 (he came in fourth, with 0.12% of the popular vote). His sister and grandson both drowned, for which he blamed gravity and resolved to defeat it:

from Babson's essay, "Gravity: Our Enemy Number One"

Babson rejects your notion of "drowning"-- gravity knows what it did! His writing refers to life rings as "practical anti-gravity aids," which feels like a slight exaggeration of what life rings can do, but I'm not a physicist, so what do I know? He also blamed gravity for bad air circulation, causing people to "drown" in poor air; this discussion culminates in the following claim:

When a fire gets underway, super-heated combustion gases ranging from 800 to 1,000 degrees in temperature defy Gravity and quickly flood the upper halls of a house, hotel or office building. These lethal gases enter bed- and other upper rooms through open doors and transoms and asphyxiate the occupants. This means that Gravity can work against us in two opposite ways. 

It doesn't really seem fair or logical that you can blame gravity for things going up as well as down.

He wanted to defeat gravity with an anti-gravity insulator. This just makes me think he read too much H. G. Wells when he was a kid. (He also wanted to train people to not feel bothered when air was blown on their faces by electric fans. I guess that's useful... but dude, not gravity related!)

He created a gravity research foundation and sponsored prizes and that kind of thing, but part of his anti-gravity initiative was to pay colleges with stocks to install these stones. Over fifty years later, and it would seem that these blessings are still forthcoming, but a number of colleges still have the stones, including UT. Others include Colby College in Maine, Tufts in Massachusetts, and Emory in Atlanta. (Most of them are East Coast states.) Some are worded differently, ending with an intent "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents."

This blogger suspects he is the only living person to have visited all the New England gravity stones. I kinda want to outdo him and visit all of them, but so far I've only done one. (And I didn't even take a picture!)