things in order to find fault” with the dictionary. “It seems,” he went on, “as if he must have some private grudge to satisfy.”39 But Newcomb’s criticism quickly faded out against the countervailing tide of acclaim. Overall Peirce was quite satisfied with the results of his work, even though he would often remark, as he did to Paul Carus on 25 September 1890, “God forbid I should approve of above 1/10 of what I insert.”
The second major preoccupation of Peirce in 1889 was the preparation of scientific reports for the Coast Survey. For years he had accumulated gravity data with painstaking effort and at great expense, and beginning about 1887 had been trying to prepare results for publication. He had not published a major report since 1884, and that was a report on gravity determinations made in Pennsylvania in 1879 and 1880 (W5: sel. 1). Since then he had published some smaller reports, mainly on theory (e.g. W5: sels. 42, 43, 51–53) and, of course, his report on pendulum operations at Ft. Conger, but his principal gravity findings since 1880 remained unpublished. Most importantly, with the exception of the Greely report, these included all of the gravity work carried out with the Peirce invariable reversible pendulums. These unpublished results involved ten stations, six running along a north-south line between Montreal and Key West (including Albany, Hoboken, Ft. Monroe, and St. Augustine), three along an east-west line between Ithaca and Madison (including Ann Arbor), and the base station at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., which provided the constants for all the Peirce pendulum operations.
In addition to reports on gravity work involving the Peirce pendulums, results still had to be worked up for earlier operations with Repsold or Kater pendulums at Hoboken, Cambridge, and Baltimore and for some of Peirce’s early gravity work with less refined pendulums in Massachusetts (at the Hoosac Tunnel, Northampton, and Cambridge). Also, there were at least three volumes of unreduced data from observations made at Paris, Geneva, and Kew during Peirce’s final trip to Europe in 1883. All of these records together, in their raw data form, filled more than one hundred volumes of pendulum transit records and scores of chronograph sheets recording time observations.
Finally, in conjunction with his principal work of determining gravity, Peirce had applied his results to the problem of determining the shape of the earth and had made many studies and investigations of such issues as the flexure of the pendulum staff and the effect of air resistance (involving hydrodynamical theory). For that, too, he needed to prepare reports.
Peirce had begun in earnest reducing data and writing a report on operations with the Peirce pendulums in the fall of 1886, after being relieved of field duty, but his attention had soon turned to the Greely report. Upon settling in Milford, Peirce turned again to the preparation of the report he believed would carry forward the U.S. contribution to geodesy he had initiated with his 1876 “Report on Gravity at Initial Stations” (W4: sel. 13) and his “Determinations of Gravity at Allegheny, Ebensburgh, and York, Pa., in 1879 and 1880” (W5: sel. 1). His plan in June 1887 was to write first a report on what he thought was the best work done with the Peirce pendulums, the results from Ithaca, Madison, Ann Arbor, Key West, and perhaps Fort Monroe, and to give “a full account” of the pendulums, including a discussion of their theory and of the work that had been done at the Smithsonian, the base station, to determine their constants. Then, for a separate report, he planned to prepare the results from Hoboken, Albany, Montreal, and St. Augustine, also done with Peirce pendulums, but not “in the last approved way” (9 June 1887).40 But by the end of the year, Peirce had decided to organize the work into two series of stations grouped by their approximate location on either the same east-west or north-south meridian. After he finished his reports on work with the Peirce pendulums, he planned to clean up the remaining backlog.
Peirce went to work on the report for the east-west series of stations and wrote to Thorn on 28 June 1887 that it was “shaping up” and that he would soon have a draft ready, but he added: “it is a larger job than I fully realized.” Two months later Peirce still had not finished his draft and he was forced to admit that he had run into a serious difficulty: he had found an error in the mathematical theory used to calculate the effects of the viscosity of air on the period of the pendulum. “This is one of the most difficult mathematical problems conceivable,” Peirce wrote to Thorn (29 Aug. 1887), but he expected that his work would lead to an improvement in Stokes’ hydrodynamical theory which would justify the delay; by the end of September Peirce decided that he should put off further treatment of hydrodynamics for a separate memoir. The final illness and death of Peirce’s mother kept him in Cambridge for most of the month of October 1887, but by the end of November he wrote Thorn that his “long report” was almost ready, “requiring only final touches.” Two months later, on 30 January 1888, Peirce sent in what he had ready “for the sake of suggestions of which I may avail myself in making the copy of it.” He acknowledged that a lot of work, mostly clerical, remained unfinished and asked if he could have some assistance. Thorn declined and returned the draft unreviewed to be finished and copied.
Weeks passed by and Thorn’s displeasure increased. On 30 March Peirce felt the need to explain the continuing delay. Pendulum work, he pointed out, is much more complicated than other geodetic work such as triangulation, longitude work, and leveling, because there are so many more sources of error that have to be studied and corrected for. “If these difficulties are only slightly increased, there results an enormous increase, first in the precautions which have to be taken in the field, and second in the puzzle of interpreting the observations.” Defects in the construction of the Peirce pendulums, which Peirce attributed to poor American craftsmanship, made it all the more difficult to reach useful results, and the problem of hydrodynamics, now to be treated separately, had taken considerable time. “Now anybody who has ever done such a Work in such a way,—ask such men as Langley or Newcomb,—will tell you that it is impossible to make any reliable estimate of how much time it will take.” Peirce’s emotions were at a high pitch and he could not resist an allusion to Colonna’s obstructionism: “In addition to this, I was subjected to false accusations of the most disgraceful kind, and the newspapers were filled with unbounded lies about me readily traceable to important personages. All of these things, and others which I omit to mention, distracted the equanimity of my mind considerably.” In the margin of Peirce’s letter, Colonna added the sarcastic remark: “What about other people’s distractions of mind[?] Also what distracted his mind at all except the last 3 stations?” This was a clear reference to Peirce’s relations with Juliette, and the fact that she had accompanied Peirce on many of his field assignments. Even though Peirce would not have seen Colonna’s remark, Thorn and others in the Washington office would have; it indicates that rumors of scandal had infected Peirce’s Coast Survey relations with the poison that had driven him from Johns Hopkins and had virtually sent him into exile. Peirce felt compelled to respond to the irritation and displeasure Thorn had been exhibiting:
The tone of your letters would seem to betray the opinion that I am myself completely insensible to the disparity between the time I estimated for the work and the time it has occupied. But can you suppose that I do not look upon the labor of my life seriously? Or that anything that you or the Hon. Secretary could say or do about it could possibly be as grievous to me as the want of my own self-commendation? When I agreed to do this work by myself my intention was to hire a computer; for I do not believe that anybody in the world could do such work advantageously without aid. The papers amount to at least a hundredweight and the mere picking out of such as are wanted in one day will all together often occupy hours.
Peirce took time in July to work on the method for calculating the figure of the earth from gravity determinations and on 10 August submitted his results for publication. For the rest of the year, again without an assistant, Peirce continued to work on reductions of data and on flexure and time calculations. On 31 December 1888, following a recommendation from C. A. Schott, he wrote to Thorn suggesting that both series of stations be included in one comprehensive report: “The amount of additional computation required is considerable, although not so great by any means as if the constants & behaviour of the instruments had not been studied.” Peirce added, with some obvious bitterness: “The labour of writing the report,—of composing it, writing it, copying, verifying copies,—which is in part mechanical and in part requires all the ability I can bring to the task,—but in every part the utmost care and consideration, has mostly to be done over.”
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