In 1886, a man sitting in a freezing Pennsylvania farmhouse, surviving on donated day-old bread and dodging arrest warrants for unpaid debts, sketched out the logical architecture of the modern digital computer on the backs of discarded manuscripts. This episode explores the life of Charles Sanders Peirce, the Boston-born child prodigy who earned Harvard’s first summa cum laude degree in chemistry, founded pragmatism alongside William James, and was later called the greatest thinker America ever produced. It is a character study of the gap between raw intellectual power and basic human survival.

We trace how trigeminal neuralgia warped his personality, how a personal feud with future Harvard president Charles William Eliot locked him out of academia for forty years, and how rival Simon Newcomb used a moral scandal to get him fired from Johns Hopkins. We also confront his use of formal logic to rationalize racial prejudice, his work at the U.S. Coast Survey measuring gravity and redefining the meter, his expansion of semiotics, and the secret charity fund William James organized to keep him alive.

• How Peirce mapped the true-or-false statements of formal logic onto electrical switching circuits, creating the concept of the logic gate decades before it could be built
• What pragmatism actually says: the meaning of a concept lies entirely in its practical, real-world effects
• Why a mind devoted to logic could still weaponize a syllogism to justify 19th-century racial hierarchy
• The Amadeus-style rivalry with Simon Newcomb that ended Peirce’s career at Johns Hopkins and the Coast Survey
• Why Peirce adopted the middle name Santiago as a tribute to William James, and what scholars found in his 100,000 unpublished pages