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 John ...