Samuel Spahr Laws was born on March 23, 1824, in Wheeling, West Virginia.

He was an American theologian, professor, businessman, and inventor. In 1848, he graduated as a class valedictorian from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He also studied at Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1854, he became a professor at Westminster College, and in 1855, he was elected to the position of its president. At the outbreak of the American Civil War 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 jailed for 3 months in a St. Louis, Missouri prison and was released on the condition that he leave the U.S. He spent 1862 teaching in Paris, but in 1863, he returned to the U.S., settled in New York, and found a job as manager of New York City's Gold Exchange. As an amateur electrician, he invented the Laws Gold Indicator, a predecessor of the electric stock ticker tape machine. Laws served as president of the University of Missouri (1876-1889) and in 1889, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he continued to write books and manage his investments. In 1893, he accepted a teaching position in Columbia, South Carolina at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, where he taught until his retirement in 1898. Following retirement from his teaching career, he lived in Richmond, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and finally Asheville, North Carolina.

In 1860, he married Anna Maria Broadwell (1825–1917). He died on January 9, 1921, in Asheville, North Carolina.