Fantastically Wrong: The Inventor of the Airliner Also Invented This Hilariously Absurd ‘Science’

Alfred Lawson, second from left, and crew, Sep. 16, 1919 in Mineola, Long Island.

Right off of Interstate 94 in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, just to the north of Erickson Trucks-N-Parts, sits a farm with a barn-like building that bears a curious message on its big gray roof: “STUDY NATURAL LAW.” It’s what remains of a university founded by Alfred William Lawson, surely one of the most delusionally pompous and hilariously pseudoscientific, yet undeniably innovative humans of the 20th century. He was a man who kiiinda invented the airliner, then his own brand of science, and then built a school to teach said science—before being called before a Senate committee (and not in a good way) and dying disgraced shortly thereafter.

Writing in the third person, per his M.O., Lawson claimed “his mind responds to every question, and the problems that stagger the so-called wise men are as kindergarten stuff to him.” And writing through the pseudonym Cy Q. Faunce, perhaps betraying a hint of modesty, or at least tact: “To try to write a sketch of the life and works of Alfred W. Lawson in a few pages is like trying to restrict space itself. It cannot be done.”

According to Martin Gardner in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, the Life That Cannot Be Sketched began in London in 1869. (“The birth of Lawson was the most momentous occurrence since the birth of mankind,” Cy Q. Faunce once wrote.) Lawson’s family moved just after this miraculous event to Canada before settling in Detroit, though Lawson eventually ran away from home and hopped freight trains around the States. At 19 he began a nearly two-decade career as a pro baseball pitcher, though he eventually grew disillusioned with all the money, tobacco, and liquor. And, apparently, fun.

In 1908 he began pursuing another passion: aviation. After editing a few industry magazines, he designed and built training planes for the Army, and according to Gardner claimed to have been the first to propose the idea of the aircraft carrier. In 1919, though, he embarked on the quest that would become his legacy—inventing the passenger airliner … well, kinda. His first airliner could carry 18 passengers, while two competing planes in Europe, which took to the skies just months before Lawson’s, could carry only four—hardly what we could consider commercially feasible, but nevertheless airliners of a sort. Regardless, in the following years he brought innovation after innovation to commercial flight, and built a rather profitable company to boot. But when a new model of his airliner crashed in 1921, his financial backers fled, and Lawson Airlines collapsed.

One of Lawson Airline’s formidable planes. One of those guys may be Lawson, but it’s hard to tell because they didn’t have megapixels and autofocus and whatnot back then.

With a bankrupt company behind him, in 1942 Lawson founded the University of Lawsonomy. Here students learned Lawson’s, shall we say, singular science of Lawsonomy from teachers known as “Knowlegians.” These were the school’s indisputable tenets:

Education is the science of knowing TRUTH.
Miseducation is the art of absorbing FALSITY.
TRUTH is that which is, not that which ain’t.

FALSITY is that which ain’t, not that what is.

Hard to argue with that. What’s easy to argue with is pretty much the entirety of Lawsonomy’s other teachings, which were hard for students to ignore on account of the university banning all books not written by Lawson himself, including at one point a work on the rules of basketball. You know, just to be safe.
Earth Has an Anus, and Other Teachings of Lawsonomy

First of all, Lawsonomy teaches that energy doesn’t exist. Like, at all. What Lawson proposed, according to Gardner, is that we instead have an eternal battle between substances of varying densities. Materials of heavy density move toward those with less density, creating “suction” and “pressure.” So, we can see because our eyes draw light in by suction (in reality, light travels just fine on its own, thank you very much), while gravity is the “pull of the Earth’s suction” (it’s actually a distortion of space-time). This theory was derived from Lawson’s groundbreaking observation, at age 4, that blowing on dust pushed it away, while inhaling brought it closer.

Lawson was a handsome man, which might help explain why people would buy into his baloney.

According to Lawsonomy, our planet is swimming in ether, but Earth itself is made of “lesether.” Because lesether is less dense than ether, it creates suction through a hole at the North Pole that drags in gases from meteors and such. These nutrients enter arteries deep in the Earth to be distributed all over the globe, and are eventually fired out the Earth’s anus at the South Pole. (Gardner fails to make the connection here to another eccentric, John Cleves Symmes, who more than 100 years before proposed that Earth had the same openings. Symmes was so convinced of this, in fact, that he wrote to 500 world leaders, colleges, and intellectual societies calling for funding and men to undertake an expedition to discover the gaping chasm at the North Pole, taking care to attach a document to each letter certifying his sanity. The expedition, if you can believe it, never got the backing it needed.)

As for our bodies, suction and pressure are at work there too, Lawson claimed. Air and food are sucked in, while pressure ejects waste. In fact, the human body is simply aswirl with suction and pressure, but when all that ceases, you perish. Sex is also all suction and pressure: women are the former and men the latter. Plus, the “attraction of one sex for the other,” writes Lawson, “is merely the attraction of Suction for Pressure.” This, conveniently enough, also solves the “mystery” of magnetism. Should a magnet have more female particles than male, “it will have the power of suction,” while a magnet with more male particles produces pressure to “push matter away from it.” (Magnetism, in fact, comes down to electrons all aligning their magnetic fields within atoms, which themselves must align inside a metal like iron to make it magnetic.)

Now, when it comes to the brain, that marvelously complex structure, simple suction and pressure won’t suffice. Here, according to Lawsonomy, two tiny creatures are locked in perpetual conflict: the Menorgs, or mental organizers, and the Disorgs, the disorganizers—“microscopic vermin,” claims Lawson, “that infect the cells of the mental system and destroy the mental instruments constructed and operated by the Menorgs.” He adds in rather poetic terms that “a Menorg will sacrifice himself for the benefit of the body, but a Disorg will sacrifice the body for the benefit of himself.”

These teachings went on at the University of Lawsonomy for 10 years before trouble appeared in the form of a hearing of the Senate Small Business Committee, which was curious as to how exactly the school had bought 62 machine tools from the war surplus, only to resell three-quarters of them “for a handsome profit,” according to Gardner. In Washington, Lawson went before the panel to claim ignorance, and his “attempts to explain Lawsonomy to the Committee, and how it included mechanics, proved somewhat confusing.” Leaving the meeting, Lawson supposedly called the affair “the damnedest thing I’ve ever heard of in all my life.” To which one senator retorted, “I don’t know whether we’re talking about the same thing, but I’m inclined to agree with you.”

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