Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 6. Charles S. Peirce

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СКАЧАТЬ assistants—was extremely time-consuming, and severely limited the time he could spend answering letters and promoting his logic course. More disturbing, starting in September of 1886 a crisis had been brewing over the report on pendulum operations from the ill-fated Greely Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay in the Arctic, and Peirce was caught in the middle of it.⁵ In 1881, then Lieutenant Adolphus Greely led an Army expedition of twenty-five men to the northeastern part of Ellesmere Island to establish a scientific station above the 81st parallel at Fort Conger off Lady Franklin Bay. Greely’s party had been organized to participate in the first International Polar Year, an eleven-nation effort to advance earth science in the Arctic and Antarctic during 1882–83. The astronomer for Greely’s party, Sergeant Edward Israel, had been specially trained by Peirce in the use of pendulums for gravity determinations, and for sixteen days in January 1882 he diligently swung Peirce Pendulum No. 1 in a specially constructed ice shelter. Greely’s party met with disaster when supply ships failed to reach Fort Conger in 1882 and 1883, and when a navy vessel finally reached the retreating expedition about two hundred miles south of Lady Franklin Bay at Cape Sabine in June 1884, only seven men had survived and only six would make it home. Throughout the agonizing final winter, with starvation threatening his men, Greely took great pains to preserve the scientific data obtained at such a high price. Knowing that the heavy pendulum was a dangerous burden as his party retreated from Fort Conger to Cape Sabine, Greely had given his men the option of abandoning it, but they had declined. Fearing that his party’s camp might be missed by the much hoped-for relief expedition, he sent a party on 23 October 1883 to a prominent point on an island a few miles south of Cape Sabine in Payer Harbor to cache the records. Peirce’s pendulum, sealed in its case, was erected as a towering marker over the cache (see woodcut on p. 219).

      The rescue of the expedition made international headlines, and Greely became an instant celebrity. There was some initial concern that the tragedy might have resulted from poor judgment on his part, and it was rumored that the survivors had resorted to cannibalism, but Greely was quickly exonerated. However, discord over the cost of the expedition and rescue troubled President Arthur and Secretary of War Lincoln, and they remained cool to Greely and even used his disaster as an opportunity to argue against future federal support for dangerous scientific missions. Not until Cleveland was elected President would Greely be duly recognized for his achievement and promoted first to Captain in 1886 and then to Brigadier General in 1887. The initial controversy over his leadership and the attempt to use his misfortune as an argument against federal support for science made Greely very sensitive to any criticism of his party's achievements.

      In his first dispatch following the rescue, Greely had stated with much satisfaction that his party had saved and brought back the records of the meteorological, tidal, astronomical, magnetic, and pendulum observations, and he mentioned proudly that he had brought back the pendulum. In the 19 September 1884 issue of Science, the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science proclaimed that “nothing in the annals of scientific heroism exceeded the devotion of those hungry men in sticking to that ponderous piece of metal." In consequence of the criticism of his expedition, and the considerable attention 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 СКАЧАТЬ