1839 Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Sarah Hunt Mills and Benjamin Peirce, a noted mathematician and professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard.

1859 Following graduation from Harvard, spent a year at US Coast and Geodetic Survey, and then studied chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School. Met and married his first wife Harriet Melusina Fay. Graduated summa cum laude in 1863 from Lawrence.

1863 Began work again for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey as a computing aide for his father.

1864-5 and again in 1869-70, lectured at Harvard on the early history of modern science. Later lectured at Harvard on Logic, 1870-1.

1867 Elected fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1871 Charles begins to supervise an appropriation obtained by his father to initiate a geodetic connection between the surveys of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Peirce contributes to the theory and practice of pendulum swinging as a means of measuring the force of gravity.

1876 Harriet leaves him.

1877 Elected member of National Academy of Sciences. Begins publishing a series of articles in Popular Science Monthly, where he begins to explain ideas that we the results of discussion on the Metaphysical Club, a group formed at Harvard by Pierce and others, to discuss philosophical matters.

1878 Photometric Researches published in Harvard Observatory Annuals (concerning a more precise determination of the Milky Way Galaxie’s shape)

1879-84 Lectureship in logic at Johns Hopkins University. Throughout his life he also gave lectures on logic and the history of science at Harvard. His difficult personality and reputation for "loose living" kept Peirce from a professorship.

1880 Elected member of London Mathematical Society.

1883 Divorced from Harriet. Marries Juliette Pourtalai (nee Froissy) in 1884. No children from either marriage. They settled near Milford, PA., on the Delaware River, in 1887.

1891 Resigns from US C&G Survey, after frequent disagreements with his administrators since 1885. With a small legacy, he planned to organize and write up the results of years of philosophical reflection, but lack of employment forced him to write popular articles and no book ever materialized. He called himself a "bucolic logician"—a refuse for logic’s sake.

1914 Peirce dies of cancer. His papers were sold to the Harvard philosophy department after his death, and appeared in a series of volumes known as his Collected Papers.