Charles Sanders Peirce
The world would have been a mess if six-foot-nine-inch professional basketball player LeBron James (King James) had lived before the scientific revolution. Before the 16th century, it would have been nearly impossible for him to find shoes that fit him properly. King James does not order his shoes using metric measurements. Still, thanks to the invention of the meter, the scientific revolution led to more accurate measurements and ultimately better-fitting shoes for him.
The meter, however, had somewhat of a rocky road. It is likely that before the meter, the actual standard sizing was based on the size of a human foot. According to some scholars, the foot as a unit of measurement originated with Charlemagne's feet, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the 9th century. During the 12th century, England's King Henry I used his arm to measure. He determined that a standard "foot" would be one-third the length of his 36-inch arm. In the 13th century, King Edward II decided that three barleycorns, a barley grain, would be used for shoe size measurement. Therefore, 36 barleycorns equal one foot.
Even Stonehenge was involved in the folklore. Archeologists Mike Parker Pearson and Andrew Chamberlain think that the etymology of a foot was derived from Stonehenge surveys. Over the years, the measurements were so messed up that more than 250 thousand formats were used worldwide. At one time, the system was so broken that the lead would be lighter if you measured a pound of lead against a pound of bread.
Three hundred seventy-five years later, a ne'er-do-well polymath who died pennilessly would be the first to use the meter to measure wavelengths. In the same way as moving from the foot to the meter for Lebron's shoes, measuring wavelengths created the path for the multicolored weather pattern we see on the news. For the first time, Charles Sanders Peirce experimentally tied a unit, the meter, to an absolute standard, the wavelength of a spectral line. But he never received much credit for that work. This work was never completed and mostly ignored. He was overlooked by academics repeatedly, and he lived his last years at the brink of starvation. He was considered a strange and unruly man by his peers. He was arrogant and believed to be his worst enemy. In an obituary notice, his nephew wrote, "He loved and hated and quarreled with almost everyone he came in contact with." In his last years, Peirce doubted the value of giving women the vote. "They have all the influence they need," was the way he put it.
However, despite being an ugly human, he made significant contributions to science and philosophy. Peirce's two primary obsessions were logic and precision measurements. He liked to measure things. One of his earliest jobs was the National Geodetic Survey (NGS). Peirce's influential father, a mathematician who taught at Harvard University for approximately 50 years, got him the job to get him out of serving in the American civil war. Even worse, Peirce's father, living in Boston, was a confederacy sympathizer. It turns they were both racists. They were both considered Boston Brahmins. This was back in the day when going to Harvard meant something different from what it does today. The joke was that the Boston Brahmins ancestors sent their servants ahead on the Mayflower to prepare the summer cottage.
"And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God."
Poem by John Collins Bossidy
At the very least, they were what you might call "Waspy Snobs."
As a polymath, Charles Sanders Peirce worked with the US Coast Guard and the early origins of the NOAA organization. Among numerous amount of skills, he was also a meteorologist. Peirce's particular measurement tool of choice was a pendulum. The pendulum led him to create the first American-based Philosophy called Pragmatism. In his never-ending quest to make the perfect measurement fused with his keen understanding of logic, he realized there was a point at which the accuracy of the pendulum crossed the pragmatic cost of building it. In other words, there was an economic point at which a measurement device yielded just enough accuracy where the cost of more accuracy would yield diminishing returns.
Near the end of the 19th century, several young academics from Harvard, including Peirce, formed the "Metaphysical Club." This gathering would be the birthplace of the first American philosophy known as Pragmatism.
"An American movement in philosophy founded by C. S. Peirce and William James and marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is preeminent to be tested by the practical consequences of belief."
The reset you could say is history or in this blog post A Brief History of PDSA
