2026-10-06 Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ethw.org) - Peek-Frank

Chrome showed an Anubis bot-check page; the pages were then read with the web-fetch fallback (summarising tool; quotes below are as returned by it, not checked against the page by eye). Source: "Transformers at Pittsfield" history (GE Pittsfield transformer history, author not recorded here), a company-history document hosted by ETHW; GE was Peek's employer.

Part 1 [web: https://ethw.org/Archives:Transformers_at_Pittsfield,_part_1] (first 100,000 of 163,770 characters read): - "F.W. Peek was born in California in 1881. He graduated from Leland Stanford University in 1905 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and from Union College in Schenectady with a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1911." - "He entered the employ of the General Electric Company in 1905 as a test man in Schenectady. A year later, he was placed in charge of special testing in engineering research." - "Mr. Peek became interested in high voltage research about 1906 ... Funding was hard to obtain, so he set up a laboratory in an old boxcar in a remote corner of the Schenectady G.E. plant." - "Soon after Dr. Steinmetz built his first lightning generator in Schenectady, Mr. Peek was building similar machines in Pittsfield, but at ever increasing voltages." - "In 1931, Mr. Peek was named Chief Engineer of the Pittsfield Works, succeeding Giuseppe Faccioli" (Faccioli is the source of the Leadville line data cited in the book). - Killed "in an automobile accident while travelling on vacation in Canada in 1933; he was fifty-two years old."

Part 2 [web: https://ethw.org/Archives:Transformers_at_Pittsfield,_part_2] (first 100,000 of 165,572 characters): - "In 1910, F.W. Peek developed the first mathematical basis for determining the probability of corona occurring in a high voltage system." - Peek's 1915 AIEE paper "The Effect of Transient Voltages on Dielectrics" (Trans. AIEE, Sept 16, 1915) described the circuit he used to produce impulse waveforms. - "In 1928, Peek designed a 3.6 million volt generator. This was followed by a five million volt generator in 1929, and then a ten million volt version in 1932." - "F.W. Peek was very instrumental in the early compilation of sphere gap sparkover data." - Part 2 gives the year of death as 1931, against 1933 in part 1, Wikipedia and the NYT headline (28 July 1933): an internal inconsistency in this source. - Google snippet: "In 1923, a new two million volt lightning generator was built for use in Building 12A. It was designed by W.L. Lloyd, Jr."

Part 3 [web: https://ethw.org/Archives:Transformers_at_Pittsfield,_part_3]: no mention of Peek in the first 100,000 of 147,275 characters (fetch tool); a Google snippet shows part 3 lists "F.W. Peek, Jr., 'The Effect of Transient Voltages on Dielectrics', AIEE ..." in its references, presumably in the unread tail.

Bearing on the claims: claim 5 (impulse tests 1915; the impulse circuit is described in the 1915 paper, which is the full primary report behind the book's appendix data); claim 4 (sphere gaps as voltmeters); biography and the GE setting (interested party). Recheck: read the remaining characters of parts 1-3.