Economist Roger Babson, founder of Babson Park, was a great fan of Sir Isaac Newton.

Newton's writings were the backbone of Babson's financial theories. He credited Newton's Law of Action and Reaction with his ability to predict the 1929 stock market crash nearly two months before it happened.

"The stock market will fall by its own weight," he once said.

Babson even went so far as to purchase a room in Newton's last London residence, Alexander Vilenkin wrote in "Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes." He also bought an apple tree from Newton's family home in Lincolnshire that was said to be descended from the one that dropped the fateful fruit on Newton's head.

Yet Babson had a beef with Newton. Personal tragedies led him to spend his senior years fighting one of Newton's most basic findings: gravity.

"Roger W. Babson fought the law of gravity, and gravity won," Austin Wright wrote last month in The Chronicle for Higher Education. "Today antigravity research is an all-but-extinct field of study that has devolved into little more than science-fiction fantasy."

Three generations of Babson's immediate family suffered tragedies in Babson's lifetime. In each case, Babson felt gravity was to blame.

Babson's sister Edith, for instance, drowned in Massachusetts's Annisquam River in the 1890s when Babson was 18.

"She was unable to fight gravity, which came up and seized her like a dragon and brought her to the bottom," Babson wrote in an essay, "Gravity - Our No. 1 Enemy."

Many years later, Babson's son died in an airplane crash. Then, in the late 1940s, his grandson drowned in a lake.

By the time his grandson drowned, Babson was in his 70s, a self-made millionaire who cared little what others thought of him. So he finally revealed his obsession with overcoming gravity.

He founded the Gravity Research Foundation, which he charged with creating "anti-gravity screens" that could block gravity and allow people to become "weightless at will," as Time magazine put it.

As he expected, he was mocked as an eccentric. Newsweek called him "Sir Isaac Babson." Time magazine gleefully poked fun.

"Lots of people, including Einstein, talk about gravity, the restraining force which makes people walk on floors instead of floating in midair," Time wrote January 1950. "What worries Roger Babson ... is that no one does anything about it."

Yet not everyone saw Babson's idea as a joke. Many businesses leapt at the chance to implement any of Babson's research findings.

"A leading shoe manufacturer offered Babson $100,000 for 'something that can be put into the sole of a shoe to insulate against gravity,'" Time wrote. "Floor-covering manufacturers showed a lively interest in the possibility of 'flying' carpets."

Two of Babson's efforts have had a lasting impact. First, he created competitive annual grants for gravity researchers. Although the focus has changed from antigravity to gravity research, the Gravity Research Foundation continues to award the grants each year. Famed British physicist Stephen Hawking has won the award five times.

Babson's second gift to gravity research gets a little less respect. Monuments were given to universities across the U.S. in the 1960s as part of a gift agreement Babson arranged. Known as "antigravity stones," they stand "to remind students of the blessing forthcoming when science determines what gravity is, how it works and how it may be controlled," states one such stone at Eastern University in Pennsylvania.

Generations of students have been disappointed to discover that, despite their best efforts, the stones won't float.

[ Cinnamon Bair, a Polk County native, can be reached at