In 1886 Charles Peirce saw that electrical switches could do logic
Decades before digital computers, the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce realised electric switching circuits could carry out logical operations. Bertrand Russell called him perhaps the greatest American thinker ever. Yet Harvard's longtime president, who disliked him from student days, kept vetoing his hiring for almost the whole of Peirce's working life.
Peirce was born in 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, son of Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor of mathematics and astronomy. At twelve he picked up Elements of Logic by Richard Whately, then the standard English textbook, borrowed from his brother, and never lost the fascination. From his late teens he suffered what was then called facial neuralgia, now recognised as trigeminal neuralgia; his biographer Joseph Brent describes attacks leaving him cold, suspicious and prone to rages, which may explain his later isolation.
His Harvard record was otherwise unremarkable, but in 1863 he earned the university's first summa cum laude degree in chemistry. He befriended William James and Chauncey Wright, and made an enemy of the instructor Charles William Eliot, who as Harvard's president from 1869 to 1909 repeatedly blocked his employment. Instead, from 1859 to 1891, Peirce worked on and off for the United States Coast Survey, refining pendulum methods for measuring tiny local variations in gravity, sheltered by his father's influence until 1880. The post also kept him out of the Civil War; his Boston Brahmin family sympathised with the Confederacy.
His intellectual output was vast. He developed theories of relations and quantification in logic, gave rigorous forms to deduction and mathematical induction, and named abductive reasoning, the inference to a likely explanation. He helped found statistics and semiotics, treating logic as the formal side of the study of signs. C. I. Lewis judged his contributions to symbolic logic more numerous and varied than anyone's in the nineteenth century.
Some honour him as the founding figure of pragmatism. In metaphysics he described himself as an objective idealist in Kant's lineage and a realist about universals, and he held that continuity and chance are genuine features of the world, doctrines he labelled synechism and tychism. Knowledge, for him, was always fallible yet not hopeless. He died in 1914.
Source: Charles Sanders Peirce
