Zig-Zag-and-Swirl: Alfred W. Lawson's Quest for Greatness

6. The Wizard of Reason and the Origin of Lawsonomy

6 THE WIZARD OF REASON AND THE ORIGIN OF LAWSONOMY Anyone looking into Born Again and Lawson 's magazine editorials will quickly spot Lawson's fascination with movement. "To learn how matter was forced to move about in space eternally," Lawson later acknowledged , was "uppermost in [Lawson's] mind, almost from the day of his birth." He found nothing mysterious about his preoccupation : "such an inclination was born in him and was but the effect of a preceding cause." The "preceding cause" was the intense mental concentration which Lawson's father had summoned for the building of a perpetual motion machine during the three years prior to Lawson's birth. "Thus the thoughts passing through the mind of the father were generated into the seed from which the child was initiated during the year of 1868 and born ... on March 24, 1869." That none of his brothers and sisters had similar preoccupations or scien- . tific inclinations confirmed this explanation , Lawson believed. However, in contrast with his father, whose focus was only on perpetual motion, Lawson was obsessed with perpetual movement . What causes movement? he wanted to know. Especially he sought an answer to this question: what can account for the movement of matter into transitory "formations " (for example, atoms, molecules, raindrops, trees, human bodies, the earth, the solar system, galaxies), the inevitable breaking down of the formations, and the THE WIZARD OF REASON 11 5 subsequent movement of the same matter into new formations, world and time without end? In a story which may well rank with those of Archimedes in the bathtub and Newton under the apple tree, Lawson explained how he got his first inkling of the answers to these questions. In 1873 at the age of only four years, confined with measles to a darkened room, he noticed in the air dust particles illuminated by the shaft of sunlight entering between the blinds and window frame. Swirling around, they suggested to his mind "a series of minute worlds moving about in space." Then came the decisive discovery: "By blowing out his breath against these particles he learned that he could push them away and scatter them apart by PRESSURE and that by drawing in his breath he could pull them in and hold them together by SUCTION." The discovery made by the four-year-old boy remained at the forefront of his mind in subsequent years, issuing at last in matured scientific conclusions reached by the middle-aged man. Convinced that his youthful discovery could be generalized to account for all movement of matter, Lawson eagerly awaited the opportunity to work up his secret in a systematic statement. The opportunity came several years later with his "vacation from business affairs" imposed by the crash of the Midnight Liner. In another venture into autobiography, Lawson: From Bootblack to Emancipator (1934), he described his next undertaking and its significance as follows: "So he quickly forgot all about his property losses and buried himself for three years in a work of love without pay, that future generations would be benefited by his labors. And during those three years of super-labor, Lawson lifted the entire science of physics out of the quick-sands of theory and mysticism and placed it upon the solid foundation of absolute fact and reality." Shortly into this three-year period of intellectual effort, Lawson was ready to present to the world his first announcement of his revolutionary conclusions. That came on September 19, 1922, the day on which Lawson informed the press corps of Washington, D.C., that he would receive them in his hotel and reveal a great scientific breakthrough . For the occasion, he prepared a statement, "The Key to Perpetual Movement: A Digest of the Causes and Effects of Universal YOUNG LAWSON STUDYING THE MOVEMENT OF MATTER At oge four, lowson mode his first discoveries of suction ond pressure. From lowson, Children. THE WIZARD OF REASON 117 Laws," which he copyrighted at the Library of Congress and "telegraphed to all parts of the world" on the same day. Of the hundreds of Washington correspondents, only three showed up. One who did was the Milwaukee Journal's reporter, who probably was curious to know what Lawson had been up to since leaving Milwaukee a year earlier. In his dispatch published the next day, this correspondent took note of several strange new words he had heard at this press conference, including "Lawsonomy" and...