1. Samuel Spahr Laws was an American minister, professor, physician, college president, businessman and inventor best known today as the inventor of the Laws Gold Indicator, a predecessor of the ticker tape machine.
12 Facts About Samuel Laws
1. 2.
Samuel Laws was an 1848 graduate and class valedictorian of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and a member of the Alpha chapter of Beta Theta Pi, founded nine years before his graduation in 1839.
3.
Samuel Spahr Laws became a professor at Westminster College in 1854.
4.
Samuel Laws raised funds to establish an endowment that compared favorably with the more established east coast schools, and enrollment ranked fourth among all colleges of the Presbyterian Church.
5.
Samuel Laws had a dominating personality, and he did not tolerate well interference from other school officials.
6.
Samuel Laws was removed from his position and jailed for three months in a St Louis, Missouri prison, where he spent his time reading Aristotle.
7.
Samuel Laws was released on the condition that he leave the United States.
8.
Samuel Laws spent 1862 teaching in Paris, but in 1863 he returned to the United States and settled in New York.
9.
In 1863, Samuel Laws returned to New York from Paris, and he found a job as manager of New York City's Gold Exchange and an amateur electrician, invented the gold indicator to put an end to the crush of messenger boys scurrying into the Exchange and back out to their clients with the latest gold price in hand.
10.
Samuel Laws initially placed a gold indicator in a window at the Exchange, but he soon began installing them, through his newly founded Reporting Telegraph Co.
11.
In June 1869, Laws hired a penniless would-be inventor named Thomas A Edison as mechanical supervisor.
12.
Samuel Laws served as president of the University of Missouri from 1876 to 1889.