Victor Lenzen

Whilst at Harvard Lenzen was responsible for taking Charles Peirce's papers from Arisbe to Harvard. His familiarity with the papers gave rise to his suspicion that there were still in existence Peirce's gravity reports. From 1859 until the last day of 1891, Peirce had been employed by the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, in various geodetic investigations. These included making precise measurements of the intensity of the gravitational field at different locations. Peirce used swinging pendulums often of his own design. This practical involvement in physics played a major role in his Peirce's rejection scientific determinism.[2] Lenzen's investigations led to the location of these report by Coast Survey archivist, Albert Whimpey in 1968. When Lenzen studied the papers he found that Peirce had first presented an overview of his methodology before presenting the data. Although this became common practice in the twentieth century this was not well received at the time. Simon Newcomb was particularly dismissive. Peirce refused to rewrite the reports. Thomas Corwin Mendenhall refused to publish them and engineered Peirce's sacking. Nevertheless, the data was used with inadequate attributation to Peirce. When looking Peirce's results nearly a hundred years later Lenzen found their accuracy comparable to contemporary computer results for the data.[3]