Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 6. Charles S. Peirce
in a substantially complete state (though then only embracing 4 stations) with the request that it be submitted to such critical examination as might be practicable and the result communicated to me for my aid in revision. The request was refused; and your letter embodying the refusal, conveyed to me the conviction that any flaws however trifling which might be detected would be husbanded to form material for an attack after the report was printed. Under these circumstances, my caution about parting my MS. out of my hands is naturally increased…. I am unable to say more definitely at what time my report will be ready, than that it will be during next spring.
On 11 January 1889, Peirce reassured Thorn that “the full report on the meridional line from Montreal to Key West inclusive & from Albany to Madison inclusive will be completed during the Spring,” but Thorn, at Colonna’s instigation, had lost faith in Peirce and decided that it was time to see exactly where things stood. He ordered Peirce to package up all of his work on the report and ship it to Washington for examination. Peirce complied, and two days later had packed and shipped twenty large books of reduced data and 2037 carefully inventoried and numbered manuscript pages and draft materials (see p. 636). Peirce could not let pass unaddressed the distrust that Thorn’s order so clearly revealed. He told Thorn that he was glad to send all of his working documents because, for one thing, it would rebut the insinuation that the draft report he had sent the previous year had represented little effort on his part. But Thorn would also see that a great deal had been accomplished since then “and that the principal cause of the delay in completing the work has been the great amount of time spent upon the general method of pendulum observations and reductions,—which lay directly in my way” Peirce estimated that he needed at least three more months to complete the report and he asked again if he could submit it in draft to be looked at by specialists before making his official submission. Taking Thorn to task for a previous refusal, he added presciently:
You say your object was to prevent my shifting the blame for the report to other shoulders. Now, for my part, I really do not think the report will sink below the zero of merit; but anyway, you overlook the fact that I never asked for binding directions but only for suggestions which I might be free to adopt or not. My main, not to say my only, motive was that I had reversed the usual order of presentation in a scientific memoir by stating the conclusions before the premises; and I wished to know how this would strike another mind competent to judge of it. (30 January 1889)
Peirce’s relations with Thorn were at a very low point, yet, having unburdened himself, Peirce put his rancor aside and tried to resume normal relations. He wrote to Thorn on 4 February to say that, while the Peirce pendulum records were in Washington, he had gone to work on the Kater pendulum records from his Hoboken observations. He asked if he might go into the field again in the South—without mentioning that he was about to send Juliette to Southern Georgia for her health. Thorn declined. A few days later, Thorn returned all of Peirce’s records “precisely as received from you—with the exception of Ms. report of pendulum work, which is in your handwriting and is retained for safe keeping in the archives here …” (13 Feb. 1889).41 Peirce resumed his work on the long report and by the end of April had finished the reductions for the Montreal and Albany stations.
Whether Peirce knew on 30 January, when he wrote his spirited letter, that Thorn was about to resign is uncertain, but by mid-February it was common knowledge that Thorn would tender his resignation in March to be effective when a new superintendent was appointed. Peirce had hoped for this for a long time; he thought that a new superintendent, if a scientist were chosen and not another lawyer, would want him back playing a more active role in Survey operations. This may have had something to do with Peirce’s request to go back into the field and was surely on his mind in May when he wrote to Thorn about a plan he had conceived “by which pendulum stations may be occupied perhaps at the rate of one a day, with good result, and not at an extravagant expense” (28 May 1889). He asked Thorn again to send him back into the field to institute his new plan as soon as he finished his pendulum report, which he said would be forwarded soon. Thorn replied on 14 June with a reminder of Peirce’s “repeated promises during the past winter” that he would soon forward the report, “and now the Spring has passed.” He advised Peirce “that no other enterprise or scheme be permitted to interfere with the prompt completion of that long delayed report, upon receipt of which your plan of daily pendulum stations will be in order for submission and consideration.”
On 10 July 1889, Thorn was succeeded by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall as Superintendent of the Coast Survey. Mendenhall, who had been a student of Simon Newcomb,42 was a physicist who had taught at universities in Ohio and Tokyo before joining the U.S. signal-service in 1884. In 1886 he had assumed the presidency of Rose Polytechnic Institute in Indiana, and it was from there that he had been called to the superintendency of the Coast Survey. Mendenhall seemed well suited to lead the Survey and Peirce was delighted with his appointment. Peirce’s telegram of congratulations, sent to Indiana, was the first that Mendenhall received and he replied that it had given him great satisfaction. Peirce sent his first monthly report to Mendenhall on 31 July and took the opportunity to give a very detailed account of his pendulum work for the many years he had been in charge of gravity research. He also described at length his relations with Thorn and his general unhappiness with the direction the Survey had taken over the last half-decade.
When Mr. Thorn came in, certain charges were made against me. Later, all these were retracted with the exception of one, which was a very vague one to the effect that I had not been under proper control and discipline. Now, if I were to be informed what the questions about gravitation were, and what the facts of the case on which the solution of those questions must depend, all the discipline in the world could hardly prevent my having my way, for the simple reason that “my way” is simply what I deem reasonable, and as my ideas on this subject are clearer than other persons’, they must prevail with those very persons themselves. Accordingly, to prevent my having “my way,” I have of late years been kept as far as possible ignorant of pendulum matters. I trust you will reverse this policy, and restore me to the charge of investigations into gravitation.
As to the report Thorn had been waiting for so impatiently, Peirce wrote that it was in a typist’s hands. He had been working on a new arrangement for the report and now intended to submit it in two parts with the first one covering the work done at the Smithsonian, Ann Arbor, Madison, Cornell, and Key West. There were yet further delays, but finally on 20 November Peirce was able to write the agreeable letter that would accompany his long-delayed report (sel. 36). Although it did not include the Key West results, his submission included all of the theory, history, and discussion of constants needed for the complete report on the Peirce pendulum operations. As it was, the report ran to one hundred and forty oversize typescript pages. Peirce promised that a report on Montreal, Albany, Hoboken, Fort Monroe, St. Augustine, and Key West would soon follow, and could be published later as the concluding part of the comprehensive report.
Although Peirce’s report included all of the basic component sections present in his 1879 report (W4: sel. 13), it strikingly reversed their arrangement. Peirce also used radically different methods, the most obvious one being the introduction of “logarithmic seconds” as a unit of measurement. He also made a different application of the “resistential formula” which occurs in both reports as the basis for calculating the effect of air resistance. It is in this determination of corrections for the “second atmospheric effect” that Peirce hoped to improve on the classical theory of G. G. Stokes. As the annotations in this volume help to make out, though all of the necessary components are present, they do not all fit together entirely smoothly, and the report is marred by computational errors. This is not surprising, given the massive quantity of calculations that Peirce had to make in order to achieve his results; it is clear, however, that the report needed a thorough overhaul before it could be published.
Perhaps had Thorn still been superintendent, Peirce’s report would have followed a standard course of technical examination, proofreading, and publication, but Mendenhall was new, and he had been encouraged not to fully trust Peirce’s work, so he chose to have Peirce’s report examined by specialists for “form, matter, meaning and suitability for publication.” One of the three people he asked to examine the report was his own mentor, Simon Newcomb. On 28 April 1890, only four days after Peirce’s long memoir had been mailed to him, Newcomb