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2026-10-06 Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons - Peek-Frank

Reached through Google results; metadata read with the archive.org metadata API and full text with the djvu.txt stream (web-fetch fallback, summarising tool).

  1. Peek 1911, "The Law of Corona and the Dielectric Strength of Air" (Part I), AIEE preprint, 77 pp., DOI 10.1109/PAIEE.1911.6659605, collection crossref-pre-1923-scholarly-works [web: https://archive.org/download/crossref-pre-1923-scholarly-works/10.1109%252Fpaiee.1910.6660428.zip/10.1109%252Fpaiee.1911.6659605.pdf]. Primary source of claims 1-2: the original data and derivation that the book condenses (including the Sigma-Delta fit and the discarded points). The same collection probably holds Parts II (1912, DOI 10.1109/PAIEE.1912.6659840) and III (1913, DOI 10.1109/PAIEE.1913.6660748); not checked.

  2. Third edition, McGraw-Hill 1929 [web: https://archive.org/details/dielectricphenom0000unse]; metadata creator "F.W. Peek", date 1929, 442 page images. Copyright entry: xv, 410 p., registered Dec. 7, 1929. The project holds only the 2nd edition (1920); the 3rd edition is later work by Peek (after the 1927 Part IV paper and the lightning-generator work) and may revise the energy-distance explanation (claim 2), the loss law (claim 3) and the impulse chapter (claim 5).

  3. Theodore Thornburg Fitch, "The influence of density of gas on the formation of corona", Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 1913 (printed [New York], reprint pagination with bibliography p.1333, i.e. apparently from Trans. AIEE) [web: https://archive.org/details/influenceofdensi00fitcrich; also https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/The_influence_of_density_of_gas_on_the_formation_of_corona_.._%28IA_influenceofdensi00fitcrich%29.pdf]. Whitehead's laboratory at Johns Hopkins (Fitch cites Whitehead, "Disruptive Strength of Air", Trans. AIEE vol. XXIX, 1910). As returned by the fetch tool (not checked by eye): aim "the effects of pressure, temperature and density of gas upon the formation of the corona in air"; critical intensity measured over 5-108 cm mercury for nine conductor sizes; Peek's original equation "didn't closely match" Fitch's observations, so Fitch modified it (the tool's rendering of the modified formula is garbled and must be read from the page image); the revised form represented the observations "about as closely as the readings can be taken"; experiments with carbon dioxide indicated that the critical intensity depends on "the number and spacing of the molecules" rather than absolute gas density, which Fitch reads as support for ionization by collision; summary conclusion that the results support Peek's empirical relationship. Bearing: an independent (non-GE) measurement of claim 1's density law over a wide pressure range, by a contemporary at another laboratory. Exactly where it agrees and departs from Peek's delta form needs a page-image read.

  4. "The Berkshire Hills" (430 pp.): "Steinmetz, F. W. Peek, and their successors. In 1921 the generation and transmission of electricity in excess of a million volts was dramatically ..." (snippet only). Local-history account (priority 4).

  5. Catalog of Copyright Entries (snippet) for the 3rd edition, as in 2 above.

Downloads: none made in this run (see sites.md).