The
NOAA Corps Bulletin will be including articles on the origin
of NOAA ship names over the next year. As the NOAA Ship PEIRCE
has been recently decommissioned and is scheduled to be turned
over to the Philippine Government's Bureau of the Coast and
Geodetic Survey, it is appropriate that the first article
in this series will concern Charles Sanders Peirce, the American
scientist, philosopher, and logician for whom the ship was
named.
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE
Charles
Sanders Peirce is considered to be among the greatest intellects
that the United States has produced. The originality and versatility
of his thought have generated over one hundred Ph.D. theses,
thirty books, and over a thousand articles and chapters. There
is a philosophical society dedicated to his memory that publishes
a quarterly journal entitled the Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society.
The
bulk of Peirce's scientific work was accomplished during his
years with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey between
the years 1859 and 1891 although he remained active in the
philosophical and scientific realm right up until his death
in 1914. To give an idea of Peirce's scope of inquiry during
his lifetime, he listed the following as his principal areas
of research for Cattell's American Men of Science for 1906:
"Logic, especially logic of relations, probabilities,
theory of inductive and abductive validity; epistemology;
metrology; history of science; multiple algebra; doctrine
of multitudes; gravity; wavelengths; phonetics of Elizabethan
English; great men; ethics; phaneroscopy; cosmology; experimental
psychology; physical geometry. -- Foundations of mathematics;
classification of science; code of terminology; topical geometry."
Reading
the above mind-numbing list doesn't begin to do justice to
Peirce's intellectual accomplishments. He was the first to
attempt to determine the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy from
his studies of the brightness of stars by what he termed `photometric
researches' during years of cooperative work with the Harvard
Observatory; he was the first to relate the length of the
meter to the wavelength of light thereby establishing a standard
that could never be lost; when he attended meetings of the
International Geodetical Association at Paris in 1875 he became
the first American citizen to represent the United States
at an international meeting of the physical sciences; and,
at that same meeting, Peirce established for himself and the
Coast and Geodetic Survey international respect and renown
as he correctly pointed out an error in the European method
of gravity observations. He was the founder of the branch
of philosophy termed pragmatism; the first modern experimental
psychologist in the Americas; the first to conceive the design
and theory of an electric switching computer; and the first
to consider the branch of economics dealing with the "economy
of research."
Peirce
was born into an environment that encouraged intellectual
attainment. His father was Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor
of Natural History and Mathematics. Benjamin was a leading
mathematician of the Nineteenth Century and became the Superintendent
of the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1867. When Charles was
growing up, his home was filled with the likes of Longfellow,
Emerson, and Agassiz discussing their work and the scientific
and philosophical issues of the day. His father imbued Charles
with a love of philosophy, logic, and mathematics. Charles
went to Harvard and graduated in 1859. He then entered on
duty with the Coast Survey as an aid.
Over
the next few years he saw varied duty and also lectured at
the Lowell Institute and Harvard on the `Logic of Science'.
He also studied under Louis Agassiz at the Lawrence Scientific
School and graduated summa cum laude in 1863, the first individual
to graduate with honors. From 1867 to 1869 he was on assignment
to the Harvard Observatory and then in 1870 he was sent on
an expedition to the Mediterannean Sea to observe a solar
eclipse. For several months during 1872, he was designated
Assistant-in-Charge of the Coast Survey Office. Then in late
1872 he was directed "to take charge of the Pendulum
Experiments of the Coast Survey" and to "investigate
the law of deviations of the plumb line and of the azimuth
from the spheroidal theory of the earth's figure." The
next eight years were the zenith of Peirce's scientific work
in the Coast Survey. It was during this period that he attained
international renown as a geodesist, made pioneering studies
of the shape of the Milky Way, and used the wavelength of
light to define the length of the meter.
The
following decade was much less stellar. His father died in
1880, he was divorced from his first wife in the early 1880's,
the administration of Julius Hilgard as Superintendent of
the Coast Survey was scandal-wracked, and following Hilgard,
Frank Thorn, a political appointee with no scientific background,
was appointed as head of the Survey. It is probable that all
of these factors contributed to a lackadaisical attitude towards
his work and outright antagonism towards the administration
of the Survey.
The
inevitable occurred when Peirce tendered his resignation dated
December 31, 1891. Although he had spent over 30 years in
the Survey, there was no retirement in those days and he spent
the remainder of his life in near poverty. He wrote many scholarly
articles on a freelance basis, translated rare mathematical
and scientific manuscripts from Latin, French, and German,
and wrote mathematics textbooks.
Charles
Peirce died April 19, 1914. He had spent his life immersed
in questions of truth and reality. He believed that truth
or reality in science "is a limit approximated ever more
closely by an infinite community of investigators working
indefinitely into the future." This concept is pertinent
in NOAA Corps today as we are part of that infinite community
helping to search for the reality of global climate change,
the nature of tides and currents, the truth concerning the
optimal management of our fisheries stocks, and ever more
accurate views of the seafloor.
