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Gravity Research monument.

Anti-Gravity Monument

Field review by the editors.

Tampa, Florida

It doesn't defy gravity literally, but the anti-gravity monument does take a defiant stand toward what its originator once called "Our Enemy No. 1."

Gravity was Roger Babson's nemesis and obsession ever since his sister drowned when he was a teenager. Babson blamed gravity, and when he later became a millionaire businessman he founded the Gravity Research Foundation to find a way to defeat it. He also gave money and stock to over a dozen colleges and universities if they placed one of his inspirational tombstone-like monuments on their campuses. Tampa's went up in 1965, inscribed "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when science determines what gravity is, how it works, and how it may be controlled."

Babson died in 1967 but his monuments remain. Gravity, which makes big rocks too heavy to move, turned out to be his friend after all.

Anti-Gravity Monument

Address:
University Drive, Tampa, FL
Directions:
Drive west on W. Kennedy Blvd across the bridge from downtown, then immediately make a sharp right onto the University of Tampa campus. Drive straight back, past a gaudy building on left. The street gradually bends left. You'll come to a stop sign for a crosswalk and see a sign for the MacDonald-Kelce Library on the right; the monument is across from that, next to the street, on the left end of the crosswalk, at the corner of a gated parking lot, under a tree.
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In the region:
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