This paper examines how various private patrons intervened to support research in gravitational physics from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Our analysis centers primarily on two wealthy and eccentric businessmen, Roger Babson and Agnew Bahnson, and their efforts to galvanize the study of gravitation. Not only did these patrons provide generous funding at a time when the subject of gravitation received few other institutional sources of support; they also helped to knit together a research community. Moreover, we trace the evolution of their patronage efforts, as scientists and patrons revised their arrangements to address what came to seem weak or ineffective features of the original efforts. These unusual philanthropic efforts played an outsized role in spurring what has been called the renaissance of general relativity during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

The history of Penrose diagrams in the physics of General Relativity (GR) is presented. It is argued that the diagrams did conceptual work for physicists, providing a literal place for abstract, formal objects. Penrose diagrams were associated with the mathematics of conformal transformations applied to GR. Together the diagrams and formalism reconfigured the basic concepts of the field—notions of space, time, cosmology, and energy. Nor were the meanings of the diagrams themselves stable over time. Their physical and conceptual evolution is traced. This history also demonstrates the tight integration of the contexts of research and pedagogy in the period investigated (1962–66). Diagrams circulated rapidly between research talks and publications and the pedagogical context of summer school lectures for advanced graduate students. Further reception and circulation of the diagrams is briefly examined.