given to the pendulum, Greely was determined to include Peirce's account of the Ft. Conger pendulum observations in his official report. Yet by September 1886, over two years after Peirce had been given the pendulum records, and with everything else in hand, Greely was still waiting for the gravity results. Knowing that Superintendent Thorn feared bad publicity, Greely threatened to go to press without Peirce's report: “It is needless for me to point out the comments which will be called forth in America and Europe, if these observations are wanting when the final report appears.”6 Responding as Greely hoped, Thorn put tremendous pressure on Peirce to turn in his report at once.
Thorn knew that Peirce had delayed his report because of some remaining uncertainties over the expansion coefficient for Pendulum No. 1 which he believed could not be resolved without taking No. 1 to a northern station, preferably St. Paul or Minneapolis, where it could be swung in the summer and again in the winter under extreme conditions as similar as possible to those at Ft. Conger. Peirce felt it his duty to turn Greely’s hard-won data into the most significant results possible and he knew what that required. As early as April 1886, he had informed the Assistant in Charge of the Survey’s Washington office, Benjamin A. Colonna, of his concerns and of his plan to swing the pendulum at a suitable northern location, and by September he had informed Superintendent Thorn directly. As the Coast Survey authority on pendulum operations, and given the importance of the Greely observations, Peirce probably expected his recommendation to be accepted without opposition, but he did not count on, nor perhaps even fully comprehend, the political pressures on Thorn. Peirce’s stubbornness, however justified from the standpoint of pure science, rankled Thorn, who threatened to take the matter entirely out of Peirce’s hands. Finally seeing the urgency of issuing the report, even if not fully adequate, Peirce reluctantly conceded: “You are aware that my judgment is averse to the publication of the Greely matter; but as you were plainly determined upon it, I thought it my duty to do all I possibly could to try to render that publication useful …” When Peirce wrote this on 22 March 1887 he added: “I have wasted more time upon this than I should have thought it worth while to do, except for my desire to make the best of this Greely publication…. I perceive you are becoming very impatient, and I will give up trying to perform the impossible, and send on the work as soon as I can.”
Three weeks later Peirce submitted his report, but instead of settling things down it made matters worse. Although in muted terms, Peirce had included all of his criticisms and concerns. In accordance with Peirce’s instructions, after the pendulum at Ft. Conger had been swung for eight days, the knives had been removed and interchanged. But after that interchange, the periods of oscillation were noticeably different, too different to be accounted for, Peirce believed, by the contraction of the pendulum due to colder temperatures or by slippage of a knife, as suggested by one of Peirce’s past assistants, Henry Farquhar (see annotation 220.4), who, in the past, had frequently been assigned to assist Peirce. There was a remote possibility, Peirce suggested, that the change was the result of frost accumulation on the knives during the interchange, but he thought it really could not be satisfactorily explained and would detract from the usefulness of the results until further experiments could be made at a northern station. To make matters worse, he pointed out that the pendulum appeared to have lost between 10 and 15 grams of mass,7 probably as a result of an accident during the difficult retreat from Ft. Conger to Cape Sabine. Such a loss of mass would explain a variation in the pendulum’s period of oscillation after its return. In raising these concerns, it is clear that Peirce’s purpose was to present the Ft. Conger results in a way that made sense, and being fully aware of how often damage occurs to scientific equipment, especially in rough conditions, he had no idea his report would give offense. But Greely’s high sensitivity to criticism blinded him to Peirce’s good intentions and he became furious. Thorn set the Survey office to work to diffuse the tension. Farquhar was asked to write a supplementary report to mitigate Peirce’s account and Greely added a memorandum (pp. 243–44) in which he fervently denied that any accident had happened to the pendulum. He went so far as to accuse Peirce of having given Sergeant Israel inadequate training and of failure to supply any written instructions, even though he had earlier praised Peirce for the care with which he had instructed Israel—care documented by Peirce’s detailed written instructions, which have survived and can be found with the papers that Greely brought back from Ft. Conger (see annotation 216.19).
When he saw Greely’s memorandum, Peirce was dismayed that such offense had been taken, and he immediately submitted a conciliatory note to be printed with Greely’s memorandum (pp. 244–45). In this note, Peirce stressed that he had no intention whatsoever of imputing any blame for what he considered to be normal occurrences under the circumstances, and he emphasized that Greely and Israel deserved nothing less than the highest honor for their “signally successful” gravity determination. He did refer, though, to “the only doubt which affects the result, namely, that which relates to the temperature-correction,” but added that this doubt was destined to be resolved when further experiments could be made in the North. Greely’s two-volume report, including Peirce’s Ft. Conger “Pendulum Observations” (sel. 30), finally appeared in the fall of 1888, and Peirce’s “Explanatory Note” was inserted to appear with Greely’s “Memorandum.” Greely was satisfied and wrote to Peirce on 30 November 1888 that he understood that no blame had been intended. He added: “I beg to assure you that I have always been impressed with your earnestness and zeal in connection with these observations, and I know that you were very decided in insisting upon the conditions under which the work should be done. I cannot well believe that any one should consider you as desirous of pulling down a house which has been substantially built with your hands; for to your assiduity, skill, and knowledge must be credited, as I have always understood, the latest and most important advances in the methods of application of pendulum observations.” That brought to an end an unfortunate episode largely fueled by misunderstanding; but while Peirce’s relations with Greely seemed to have been mended, his relations with the Survey had suffered further damage.
As he grappled with the Ft. Conger pendulum results, Peirce continued working on his definitions for the Century Dictionary—before long his main concern. And, typically, from time to time other topics would catch his attention. In 1886, three members of the English Psychical Research Society, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore, published a book which recounted hundreds of cases of the hallucination of the appearance of a person who would die or had died within twelve hours of their “appearance” and a scientific case was made for the authenticity of telepathic and apparitional phenomena. William James, a close friend of Gurney and a member of the English Psychical Research Society as well as of its American counterpart, gave the book, Phantasms of the Living, a very positive review in the January 1887 issue of Science. Peirce, who would have known of the book in any case because of his many acquaintances in the American branch of the Society (to which he never belonged), including his own brother Jem, must have been struck by James’s praise for the book. Only two years earlier, Peirce had speculated (W5: sel. 24) that presumed telepathic phenomena were the result of faint sensations, and he had endorsed the field as worthy of further scientific study. So in early 1887, Peirce was working his way through the main argument of this huge book with his own review in mind—it would appear later in the year in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (sel. 16) and trigger a controversy with Gurney that would continue for two years.
Probably in March, Peirce and a few other prominent American scientists were asked to contribute short articles to The Christian Register for a series on how science viewed belief in a future life. Peirce agreed to participate and drew material from his ongoing examination of Phantasms for his contribution (sel. 14). He wrote to his mother on 3 April 1887 that his work for his correspondence course was improving his writing style and that he hoped in a year or two to be “as good a writer as these men who write the editorials in the New York papers, who turn out so much good English and good sense.” The little piece for the Register, published on 7 April, gave Peirce an opportunity not only to try out his developing style, but also to “announce” a few ideas that were growing more and more important for him and that would become signature doctrines. Among these were his ideas that the variety in the universe could not have come about by strict adherence to mechanical law and that there are no definite limits to human knowledge. According to Max Fisch, it is here that Peirce