Roger Ward Babson
New Boston, Hillsborough County, New Hampshire
Marker Inscription
Here at New Boston, N.H. Roger W. Babson and his associates prioneered in active research for anti-gravity and a partial gravity insulator 1959
The Story
Placed in 1959, this granite marker commemorates Roger W. Babson and his colleagues' earnest research into anti-gravity through the Gravity Research Foundation he founded in New Boston. Babson, the entrepreneur and forecaster behind Babson College, poured his fortune into a quixotic quest to conquer gravity after a family drowning.
Why it matters
It captures a distinctly American faith in bold, sometimes eccentric invention — the conviction that no natural force is beyond human ingenuity.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the late 1950s, New Boston, New Hampshire, was still a small, quiet New England town of white steeples, stone walls, and hill farms. But the wider world was electric with the idea that the impossible was about to become routine. The Space Age had just begun, rockets were climbing higher every year, and Americans had grown used to reading that some barrier long thought permanent had finally fallen.
Into that mood stepped a Massachusetts businessman who had made his fortune reading the future for a living. He belonged to an era that genuinely believed private wealth, applied boldly enough, could crack any problem in nature — and he decided that the oldest, most stubborn force of all, gravity, was worth taking on.
That this happened here, on a granite outcrop in rural New Hampshire rather than in a great laboratory, is part of the story. It was a very American kind of ambition: independent, self-funded, and unbothered by whether the establishment thought it sensible.
People & events
The marker honors Roger W. Babson, remembered today mainly as an entrepreneur, financial forecaster, and the founder of a college that still bears his name. Late in life he turned his attention and his money toward something far stranger than markets: the dream of anti-gravity.
According to his own account, the roots of the obsession were personal and sorrowful — a family drowning that he came to blame, in his mind, on gravity itself, the force that pulls a struggling person down. Out of that grief and a lifelong habit of tackling big problems head-on, he founded the Gravity Research Foundation and gathered associates to pursue the goal named on the stone: a way to insulate against, or partly defeat, gravity's pull.
The inscription is refreshingly plain about what they were after — active research toward anti-gravity and a partial gravity insulator, dated 1959. It records not a triumph but an attempt, and there is something moving in a monument that commemorates the try rather than the win.
Its place in the American story
Babson's quest connects to a deep strain in American life: the conviction that no law of nature is truly settled, and that a determined individual with resources and nerve might overturn what the experts call impossible. It is the same spirit that filled the age of backyard inventors, garage tinkerers, and self-taught visionaries.
Mainstream physics did not — and does not — treat gravity as something that can be switched off or shielded like heat or electricity, and Babson's specific goal remains outside accepted science. Yet the Gravity Research Foundation left a genuine mark. Its long-running essay competition drew serious thinkers, and reputable scientists have taken part in it over the decades, so the enterprise pushed real reflection on gravitation even as its founder's grander hopes went unmet.
That mix — an eccentric dream that nonetheless nudged real inquiry forward — is why this small monument matters. It captures the productive edge of American optimism, where a wildly ambitious question can outlive the person who asked it.
If you visit
Come to New Boston expecting a modest, contemplative stop rather than a grand attraction. The reward here is the idea, not the spectacle — a piece of stone that asks you to stand still and consider a man who tried to argue with gravity.
Read the inscription slowly and let its earnestness land. There is a gentle humor in a granite marker, one of the heaviest things around, quietly declaring war on the very force that holds it to the earth. Take a moment with that contrast; it is the whole story in miniature.
The surrounding town is classic small-town New Hampshire, well suited to a slow drive and a wander. Fold this into a day of back-road exploring, and let it be the odd, thought-provoking beat in your trip — the place where you learned that one determined optimist once decided the oldest rule in the universe was worth challenging.
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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Related people
- · Roger W. Babson
Related events
- · Gravity Research Foundation
Themes & tags
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