Samuel Spahr Laws (March 23, 1824 – January 9, 1921) 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 Ticker tape was the earliest electrical dedicated financial communications medium, transmitting stock price information over telegraph lines, in use from around 1870 through 1970. It consisted of a paper strip that ran through a machine called a ...

. He was an 1848 graduate and class

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Miami University Miami University (informally Miami of Ohio or simply Miami) is a public research university in Oxford, Ohio. The university was founded in 1809, making it the second-oldest university in Ohio (behind Ohio University, founded in 1804) and the ...

Oxford, Ohio Oxford is a city in Butler County, Ohio, United States. The population was 23,035 at the 2020 census. A college town, Oxford was founded as a home for Miami University and lies in the southwestern portion of the state approximately northwest ...

and a member of the Alpha chapter of

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, founded nine years before his graduation in 1839.

Life and career

Westminster College

Samuel Spahr Laws became a professor at Westminster College in 1854. At the college's first commencement in June 1855, the Board of Trustees elected Laws to the position of president of the college. Laws was officially confirmed to the position in October of that year. His term as president of Westminster was highly successful. He 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. Laws had a dominating personality, and he did not tolerate well interference from other school officials. Laws came into conflict with the Westminster trustees over matters of discipline, and at the outbreak of the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and t ...

in 1861 he was arrested and tried for treason after refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to the federal government. As a Virginia native, Laws was a southern sympathizer. He was removed from his position and jailed for three months in a St. Louis, Missouri prison, where he spent his time reading

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. Laws was released on the condition that he leave the United States. He spent 1862 teaching in Paris, but in 1863 he returned to the United States and settled in New York.

New York Gold Exchange

In 1863, 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. As the price of gold changed, an electrical signal sent from the trading floor would cause a hand on the device—a clocklike dial rimmed with numerals—to move until it pointed to the latest trading price. 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., in brokerage firms throughout Manhattan and pushing the latest prices of gold over the telegraph wires. Thus, as early as 1866, brokerage houses willing to pay the monthly fee could base trades on up-to-the-minute market information rather than waiting for runners to bring the news. In June 1869, Laws hired a penniless would-be inventor named Thomas A. Edison as mechanical supervisor.

University of Missouri

Laws served as president of the

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou, MU, or Missouri) is a public land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus University of Missouri System. MU was founded in ...

from 1876 to 1889. After he stepped down from the presidency in 1889, he moved to

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, where he continued to write books and manage his investments. In 1893 he accepted a teaching position in

Columbia, South Carolina Columbia is the capital of the U.S. state of South Carolina. With a population of 136,632 at the 2020 census, it is the second-largest city in South Carolina. The city serves as the county seat of Richland County, and a portion of the cit ...

at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, where he taught until his retirement in 1898. Following retirement from his teaching career, he lived in

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, Washington, D.C., and finally

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where he died in 1921.

Legacy

Miami University named the building that housed most of the Richard T. Farmer School of Business after Laws, and at the

, residential building Laws Hall and Laws Observatory were also named in honor of him.

References

External links

*
War Comes to Westminster College – Missouri's Civil War
at The Historical Marker Database (HMdb.org) * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Laws, Samuel 1824 births 1921 deaths 19th-century American inventors Academics from West Virginia American Civil War prisoners of war American Presbyterians Burials at Spring Grove Cemetery Businesspeople from West Virginia Christians from West Virginia Columbia Law School alumni Deaths in North Carolina Leaders of the University of Missouri Miami University alumni People from Ohio County, West Virginia People of Missouri in the American Civil War Princeton Theological Seminary alumni Westminster College (Missouri) faculty