Peek-Frank: Investigator site log

Run 1: 2026-10-06 (first run, standard 10-minute cap). Browsing 17:06:10-17:13:52 CDT (7.7 min). Chrome used for all searches; the web-fetch fallback was used only where Chrome hit a bot check (ethw.org) and for archive.org metadata/full text and one kpi.ua page. Downloads: none were made in this run; the downloadable documents are listed with URLs below (the owner can save them to research/files/ or approve a download in a later run).

Keywords tried

• "F. W. Peek" General Electric Pittsfield 1933 obituary lightning
• Peek "Law of Corona and the Dielectric Strength of Air" pdf
• "Peek" "lightning" 1922 Pittsfield "million volts" artificial lightning generator
• "Peek's law" derivation theoretical evaluation corona onset streamer criterion 0.301
• "Hundredth Anniversary of the Peek's Law"
• site:worldradiohistory.com "F. W. Peek"
• Whitehead Johns Hopkins "disruptive strength of air" corona 1910 1911 Peek
• Hartmann "Theoretical evaluation of Peek's law" ieeexplore
• Franklin Institute awards "F. W. Peek" Levy Medal 1926
• "In 1916 Charles Steinmetz argued that F. W. Peek"
• Google Patents: inventor:"Frank W Peek" before:priority:19340101; inventor:Peek assignee:"General Electric" before:priority:19340101
• HathiTrust: author "Peek, F. W."; Union College arches: "Peek, F. W." (blocked); Chronicling America: "F. W. Peek" lightning 1915-1933 (blocked)

Keywords not yet tried (from the documents): "H. K. Humphrey"; "Sigma-Delta" Peek; Faccioli Leadville corona; "Au Sable" line corona 1913; Hendricks 1906 Pittsfield corona; Scott Mershon 1898 Telluride/Colorado corona; Dubsky air films 1914; Watson d.c. corona; "visual critical voltage"; "dielectric spark lag"; "impulse ratio" 1915; "energy distance" corona; "Transil oil"; German "Peeksche Formel" / "Peek-Formel Korona"; French "loi de Peek" "effet couronne"; Peek "Merle Bell"; Peek "Gaspe" 1933 inquest.

Leads for review

1. The inventor's own work

• Peek 1927, "Law of Corona ... IV: The Mechanism of Corona Formation and Loss", Trans. AIEE 46:1009-1024 [web: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5061442]. Abstract: cathode-ray oscillograph measurements; loss "follows the quadratic law above the visual critical voltage"; no loss on polished wires below the visual critical voltage, then a sudden start; loss below it on cables follows "the probability law". Bears on claim 3 (loss law, re-measured 7 years after the book) and claim 2 (the title promises the mechanism that the 1920 book left unspecified).
• Original papers behind the book: Part I 1911 (free PDF, 77 pp., archive.org crossref-pre-1923 collection), Part II 1912, Part III 1913; sphere gap 1914; altitude 1914; "The Effect of Transient Voltages on Dielectrics" 1915 (Trans. AIEE 1857-1920, the full report of the impulse tests and the impulse circuit) [web: Wikipedia bibliography; ethw.org part 2]. Bear on claims 1, 2, 4, 5: the full data sets, including the points the book discards in the Sigma-Delta fit.
• Third edition (1929) and first edition (1915), both full view on HathiTrust and the 3rd on archive.org; "Lightning and other high-voltage phenomena" (1926), full view on HathiTrust; J. Franklin Inst. papers 1913, 1924, 1925; SciAm 1923 "Make-Believe Lightning"; lightning papers 1924 and 1926 [web: HathiTrust records 001617542, 006563261, 100648296]. Bear on claims 2, 3, 5 (how Peek's explanation changed across editions).
• 19 US patents (1908-1932) and CA275641, all assigned to GE, including US1232467 "Spark-gap" (filed 1915) and four "Electric discharge device" patents 1925-1928 [web: Google Patents]. Bear on claims 4-5 (sphere gaps, impulse and lightning protection).
• Union College: 84 catalogued items under Peek's name (letters; possibly his 1911 master's work) [web: Google snippet of arches.union.edu]; site blocked. Peek's talks: NELA address 1926 (J. AIEE Nov 1926), WGY radio talk (Science and Invention Oct 1929), New York Electrical Society paper [web: worldradiohistory.com].

2. Supporting information by others

• Theodore T. Fitch, Johns Hopkins Ph.D. thesis 1913, "The influence of density of gas on the formation of corona" (Whitehead's laboratory): critical corona intensity measured from 5 to 108 cm Hg on nine conductor sizes; per the fetch tool, Fitch found Peek's original equation did not closely match and modified it, reports that the modified form fits "about as closely as the readings can be taken", and concludes the results support Peek's empirical relationship; CO2 tests point to molecular spacing rather than absolute density [web: https://archive.org/details/influenceofdensi00fitcrich]. Bears on claim 1 (density law) as an independent, non-GE measurement; the exact modified formula needs a page-image read.
• Recognition: APS Fellow 1922; ASCE Rowland Prize 1923; Franklin Institute Levy Medal 1926 [web: Wikipedia]. Continued engineering use of the book's formulas (Electronics 1950, Westinghouse Engineer 1951; EHV transmission textbooks naming the "Peek's law" loss formula) [web: worldradiohistory.com; Google snippets]. Bears on claims 1 and 3.

3. Closely related work

• Gildas Hartmann 1984, "Theoretical Evaluation of Peek's Law", IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl. IA-20:1647-1651: derives the corona onset gradient from Meek's streamer criterion with an ionization coefficient that depends on humidity, pressure and temperature, over radii from 10^-7 to 10^7 m, and compares with experiments [web: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4504655]. Bears on claim 2 (a physical derivation of what Peek called the energy-storage distance) and on claim 1's statement that humidity has no effect.
• Protsenko and Trotsenko 2014, "A Hundredth Anniversary of the Peek's Law for Estimating the Corona Inception Electric Field", Naukovi visti NTUU KPI no. 6, pp.35-41 [web: https://kpi.ua/nv-abstract-14-6]. Bears on claim 1.
• J. B. Whitehead, "The Disruptive Strength of Air", Trans. AIEE XXIX, 1910 (cited by Fitch): a contemporary, independent programme on the same question. Bears on claims 1-2.

4. Historical record

• Career: GE test man 1905, special testing 1906, high-voltage lab in "an old boxcar" at Schenectady; transferred to Pittsfield 1916; Chief Engineer of Pittsfield Works 1931 succeeding Faccioli; lightning generators of 3.6 MV (1928), 5 MV (1929) and 10 MV (1932) [web: ethw.org parts 1-2, a GE-history source]; German press (Zeitschrift VDI, 16 July 1932) reported 10^7 V and 18-metre sparks [web: Wireless Engineer Oct 1932 abstract]. Bears on claim 5 (impulse work continued into lightning research).
• Declined the Stanford engineering chair offered by Harris J. Ryan and Herbert Hoover in June 1931 [web: Wikipedia citing Gillmor 2004].
• Death 27 July 1933 near Gaspe, Quebec, car struck by a train; NYT 28 July 1933 [web: Wikipedia; NYT site map]. ETHW part 2 gives 1931, an inconsistency inside that source.
• "Wrestling with Nature" (c.2011): "In 1916 Charles Steinmetz argued that F. W. Peek Jr.'s experiments on high-voltage lines, conducted in Steinmetz's engineering ..." (snippet only; read through a library copy). May bear on how GE presented Peek's corona work (interested party).
• Note on the record: Peek's work did not go silent. It continued in papers to 1927 and in lightning research to his death in 1933, so no absence-of-evidence analysis is needed. What remains open is whether anyone at GE after 1933 carried the "energy distance" interpretation forward.