Developer and promoter of the science of Lawsonomy. Born in London, he grew up in Detroit, and worked at various menial tasks, until he ran away from home in his teens, riding freight cars for several years. Between 1888 and 1907, Lawson became first a professional baseball player with a number of teams, later a manager. During this period he wrote his first book, a work of science fiction, Born Again (1904). Then followed a period in aeronautics, first publishing and editing popular magazines, Fly and Aircraft, and subsequently designing and building airplanes. The Lawson Aircraft Corporation, Green Bay, Wisconsin, built the first passenger planes in 1919 and 1920 and was for a while a successful business.
In his early fifties, Lawson began to formulate and promote theories in both the social and physical sciences, which were the basis of his Lawsonomy. He promulgated these theories in Manlife (1923), which sets out Lawson’s Laws of Penetrability and Zigzag-and-Swirl motion. In the 1930s, Lawson became the leader of a popular economic reform movement, the Direct Credits Society (DCS), which attacked financiers’ stranglehold on the economy, supported the abolition of interest, and advocated loosening credits to end the Depression.