Gravity Research Foundation Monument
Middlebury, Addison County, Vermont
Marker Inscription
THIS MONUMENT HAS BEEN ERECTED BY THE GRAVITY RESEARCH FOUNDATION ROGER W. BABSON FOUNDER IT IS 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… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
One of several curious monuments placed by the Gravity Research Foundation, founded by the financier Roger W. Babson, who dreamed of discovering a material that could insulate against gravity. Babson funded prizes and stone markers at colleges to spur research into harnessing gravity as a free power. This monument urges students toward that quixotic scientific goal.
Why it matters
It is a charming emblem of mid-20th-century American faith that private wealth and ingenuity could conquer any natural force.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The years after the Second World War were an age of soaring scientific confidence in America. The country had split the atom, built jet aircraft, and would soon reach for space; it seemed, for a moment, that no problem of nature was beyond the reach of money, brains, and determination. Universities swelled, research budgets grew, and the public came to expect that today's wild idea might be tomorrow's technology.
Into that mood stepped a particular kind of American figure: the self-made financier turned patron of science. Roger W. Babson had built a fortune in business forecasting and statistics, and like a number of wealthy men of his generation he decided to pour part of that fortune into a personal scientific crusade. His obsession was gravity — the most familiar force in the world, and the one he was convinced humanity might someday tame.
This monument belongs to Middlebury, Vermont, home to a small liberal-arts college, and it is one of a scattered set of nearly identical stones Babson's foundation placed at campuses around the country. It is a relic of an era that believed private wealth could summon a scientific breakthrough by simply willing — and funding — it into being.
People & events
Roger W. Babson founded the Gravity Research Foundation, and this stone is his voice speaking to students across the decades. The inscription is remarkably plain about its hope: that someday a 'semi-insulator' will be discovered, a material able to shield against gravity, so that the force might be harnessed as free power and airplane accidents reduced.
Behind that odd wording lies a genuine, if idiosyncratic, story. Babson traced his fascination with gravity to family sorrow — he came to think of it as a kind of enemy — and he channeled that feeling into prizes and grants meant to lure serious minds toward the puzzle. His foundation's essay competition, oddly enough, went on to attract entries from respected physicists, and over time it shed some of its eccentric origins and became a legitimate corner of the scientific world.
The monument's dream of 'antigravity' never arrived, and the notion of a gravity insulator sits well outside mainstream physics. But the marker is not really a claim about science so much as a portrait of a man — earnest, wealthy, a little quixotic — trying to buy his way toward a discovery he would not live to see.
Its place in the American story
Babson's stones tell an American story that runs deeper than one man's fixation. The United States has a long tradition of private citizens funding the frontiers of knowledge, from Gilded Age industrialists endowing observatories to modern billionaires bankrolling rockets and longevity research. The Gravity Research Foundation is that impulse in one of its stranger, more charming forms.
There is also something distinctly American in the monument's blend of practical hope and cosmic ambition. It does not merely wish to understand gravity; it wants to put gravity to work — cheap power, safer travel, tangible benefits for ordinary people. That marriage of idealism and Yankee usefulness runs straight through the country's inventive history.
And finally, the stones remind us that the line between crank and pioneer is not always clear at the time. Many world-changing ideas looked foolish before they worked, and a culture willing to fund even the far-fetched is a culture that occasionally stumbles onto the future.
If you visit
Look for a modest granite marker rather than anything monumental, and give the inscription a slow read — its solemn talk of 'semi-insulators' and 'free power' is half the fun, a little window into a mid-century mind. It rewards a moment of imagination more than a moment of awe.
Part of the pleasure is the setting: a quiet college town in Vermont, exactly the sort of thoughtful, academic place Babson hoped his stones would inspire. Picture generations of students walking past, most hurrying by, a few pausing to wonder whether the old financier might have been onto something after all.
If you enjoy the offbeat corners of history, this is a perfect small detour — the kind of curiosity that turns an ordinary walk across campus into a story you will retell. Treat it as a smile-inducing footnote to America's grand scientific age, and let the eccentricity charm you.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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