Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [31]
George N. Comer, president of Commercial College, a Boston trade school specializing in penmanship, bookkeeping, and similar arts, was called in to provide two important points. One was to show that the signatures could easily have been traced without the use of a pencil, thus deflating the impact of the august Agassiz and Holmes. The second-page signature appeared to be “written over No. 1 without the intervention of pencil or other tracing, and is consequently more flowing,” Comer said. But he added, “The whole signature bears the evidence to me of having been written over or copied from another, and does not have the character which the genuine signatures have.”
But the defense wasn’t all just obscure penmanship experts. The lawyers for the estate showed that they would bring out the celebrity firepower by producing as witnesses famed Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce and his celebrated son, Charles. An astronomer and mathematician born and raised in Salem, Peirce had spent the first part of his career teaching and writing dry and somewhat unremarkable textbooks, before his landmark A System of Analytic Mechanics in 1855 made him a celebrity. He had taken a leading role in establishing the Harvard Observatory, making many notable astronomical discoveries and observations. He had served on the committee drawing a plan for the Smithsonian Institution. For fifteen years he had served as director of longitude determinations for the United States Coast Survey, and in 1867 had just been appointed the Survey’s superintendent. This must have made for interesting office politics for the beleaguered George Mathiot, who had testified at such length for Hetty’s side.
Peirce’s twenty-seven-year-old son, Charles, had followed closely in his father’s footsteps. The elder Peirce had provided much of Charles’s early mathematics education, and, after graduating from Harvard, where his father taught, Charles went to work in 1861 for the Coast Survey, where he would spend the next thirty years. At his father’s direction, Charles Peirce closely examined the three Hetty signatures for improbable similarities that would have been unlikely to occur in the natural course of signing separate documents. The Peirces paid special attention to the downstrokes of the pen, which would have the greatest tendency to vary from signature to signature if written naturally. “The proposed signature must be analyzed into its characteristic lines,” Peirce said. “The safest and surest mode of performing this analysis is to adopt for the characteristic lines all those which consist wholly or in part of a downward stroke.”
In poring over the signatures, Charles Peirce had found no fewer than thirty identical downstrokes—downstrokes being, as the term implies, the two times in the forming of, say, a “w,” when the pen makes a downward slash. In addition to being a mathematical genius, Benjamin Peirce possessed an eye for the marketable quote, the sound bite in a pre-sound bite age. Sensing that thirty identical pairings of downstrokes might not possess sufficient force to impress the judges and the press, Peirce converted this finding into a mathematical probability that would be repeated in virtually every newspaper account of the trial. “In the case of Sylvia Ann Howland,” he said, “this phenomenon could occur only once in the number of times expressed by the thirtieth power of five, or, more exactly it is once in