2013.001

Purchase

Purchase

Museum Collections.

1879 - 1879

Date(s) Created: 1876 Date(s): 1876-1879

Notes: The pendulum used for the Stevens survey was a Repsold Gravity Pendulum and is in the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. ID Number PH*314638 accession number208213 catalog number314638. ==== Excerpt below about Charles Sanders Pierce is from the Introduction to Volume 3, Pierce Edition Project: http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/index.htm Later in 1875 and in 1876, Peirce swung his new pendulum for extended periods in Paris, in Berlin, and at Kew; and after his return to the United States, at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken. The Coast Survey Report for the year 1876 (not published until 1879) contained 145 pages by Peirce on "Measurements of Gravity at Initial Stations in America and Europe," on the second page of which he said: "The value of gravity-determinations depends upon their being bound together, each with all the others which have been made anywhere upon the earth.... Geodesy is the one science the successful prosecution of which absolutely depends upon international solidarity." (Making the Stevens Institute at Hoboken the "initial station" for the United States involved months of pendulum swinging there and, for that purpose as well as for readier access to Washington and other sites, Peirce took up residence in New York City. His wife Zina had her own commitments in Cambridge and Boston, and declined to accompany him. They were never reunited. By far the fullest and best account of her, and of Charles in his relations with her and with other members of her family, is Norma P. Atkinson's 1983 doctoral dissertation, "An Examination of the Life and Thought of Zina Fay Peirce, an American Reformer and Feminist.") ==== additional information about the work, equipment and process in: Writings of Charles S. Peirce: 1879-1884 http://books.google.com/books?id=E7ZUnx3FqrcC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=gravity+survey+1876+initial+stations&source=bl&ots=gPqe2TYVte&sig=ti1rgyQRSigYy7gAEHiRuuEKBtc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FnYrUtaYFbO64AOAsYGwBw&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=gravity%20survey%201876%20initial%20stations&f=false ==== Status: OK Status By: dw Status Date: 2013-09-07