Gravity - Our Enemy Number One
AKANew Boston, New Hampshire
The Gravity Research Foundation is an organization established in 1948 by businessman Roger Babson (founder of Babson College) to find ways to implement gravitational shielding. ... Thomas Edison apparently suggested the creation of the Gravity Research Foundation to Babson, who established it in several scattered buildings in the small town of New Boston, New Hampshire. Babson said he chose that location because he thought it was far enough from big cities to survive a nuclear war. Babson wanted to put up a sign declaring New Boston to be the safest place in North America if World War III came, but town fathers toned it down to say merely that New Boston was a safe place.
In an essay titled Gravity - Our Enemy Number One, Babson indicated that his wish to overcome gravity dated from the childhood drowning of his sister. "She was unable to fight gravity, which came up and seized her like a dragon and brought her to the bottom," he wrote.
The foundation held occasional conferences that drew such people as Clarence Birdseye of frozen-food fame and Igor Sikorsky, inventor of the helicopter. Sometimes, attendees sat in chairs with their feet higher than their heads, to counterbalance gravity.
Babson's success as an investor was based on unorthodox views of the operation of markets. According to biographer John Mulkern, Babson attributed the business cycle “to Sir Isaac Newton's law of action and reaction.... (with a) pseudoscientific notion that gravity can be used to explain movement in the stock markets.”