Roger (Ward) Babson

Statistician, business forecaster, and writer, born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA. An indifferent student, he was pushed by his father to study bookkeeping and engineering. He set up the Business Statistical Organization Inc (1904) and published the Composite Circular and the Babsonchart, which advised his clients on when to buy and sell their stocks, bonds, and commodities. He established the Babson Institute (later Babson College) in 1919, and in 1927 he founded Webber College (FL) to train women for business. His statistical compilations were of great importance to a generation of businessmen during the pre-computer era. He published some 40 books, mostly on statistical and financial matters.

Roger Ward Babson (July 6, 1875 – March 5, 1967), remembered today largely for founding Babson College in Massachusetts, was an entrepreneur and business theorist in the first half of the 20th Century. He also founded Webber College, now Webber International University, in Babson Park, Florida, and the defunct Utopia College, in Eureka, Kansas.

He was born to Nathaniel Babson and his wife Ellen Stearns as part of the 10th generation of Babsons to live in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Roger attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked for investment firms before founding, in 1904, Babson's Statistical Organization, which analyzed stocks and business reports.

On March 29, 1900 , Babson was first married to Grace Margaret Knight.

According to biographer John Mulkern, Babson attributed the business cycle

to Sir Isaac Newton's law of action and reaction.... Babson was surpassed by two other unsuccessful candidates:

Wendell Lewis Willkie of the Republican Party.

Babson also had a quirky side, most notably in his founding of the Gravity Research Foundation in 1948. The Foundation established a research facility in the town of New Boston, New Hampshire after Babson determined that this location was far enough away from the city of Boston, Massachusetts to survive a nuclear attack.

Babson was interested in the history of an abandoned settlement near Gloucester known as Dogtown. To provide charitable assistance to unemployed stonecutters in Gloucester during the Great Depression, Babson commissioned them to carve inspirational inscriptions on approximately two dozen boulders in the surrounding area Dogtown Common. The Babson Boulder Trail exists today as a well-known hiking and mountain-biking trail.