Metrika (2013) 76:153–159

DOI 10.1007/s00184-011-0380-6

Weibull, RRSB or extreme-value theorists?

Dietrich Stoyan

Received: 20 November 2011 / Published online: 28 December 2011

© Springer-Verlag 2011

Abstract The Weibull distribution was discovered by Rosin, Rammler, Sperling and
Bennett between 1932 and 1936 in the context of particle measurement. Weibull found
the same distribution a little later while investigating the strength of materials. More
than 10 years after, in 1951, he finally showed that this distribution has the potential
for wide applications in statistics. However, does this justify that only his name is
used to denote this important probability distribution? A neutral technical name like
“powered exponential distribution” might be more suitable. This paper discusses the
papers by Rosin, Rammler, Sperling and Bennett as well as Weibull’s work.

Keywords Rosin-Rammler-Sperling-Bennett distribution · Weibull distribution ·

Extreme-value distribution · Priority

1 Introduction

The priority of scientific discoveries is often a topic of dispute and may pose difficult
problems. Many interesting ideas are created by different researchers independently
in small time intervals. If the name of a discoverer is used to name a discovery, there
is the risk that luck may play a role and perhaps priority rights are violated. So, neu-
tral or technical names might be preferable, unless an outstanding scientist should be
honoured; Gauss may serve as an example in the case of the normal distribution.
This paper discusses the naming of the Weibull distribution, which is one of the
most widely used life or failure time distributions. It was discovered twice in the 1930s:
once by Rosin, Rammler, Sperling and Bennett (RRSB) while investigating particle
size, and then also by Weibull when he studied the strength of materials.

D. Stoyan (B)
Institut für Stochastik, 09596 Freiberg, Germany
e-mail: stoyan@math.tu-freiberg.de

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A further source of the Weibull distribution is extreme-value theory, see e. g. the

modern books Kotz and Nadarajah (2000) and Beirlant et al. (2004). The first book
contains detailed historical remarks, where famous names such as Fréchet, Fisher and
Tippett, Gnedenko and Gumbel appear.
Today, the majority of serious statistical textbooks uses the name Weibull distri-
bution without taking in account the history of this distribution, which is maybe not
fair to RRSB. However, it is different in the internet. Using Google and the search
term “Weibull distribution”, the author came to the paper Brown and Wohletz (1995),
which fairly refers in the Weibull context to Rosin and Rammler (1933a).
The present paper discusses details of the process of discovering the Weibull distri-
bution as well as why Weibull turned out to be the lucky namesake. The naming seems
to have been a “close shave” because, as the paper will show, Weibull’s theoretical
justification of the distribution was neither superior nor mathematically deeper than
that of RRSB.

2 RRSB

The abbreviation RRSB stands for Rosin, Rammler, Sperling and Bennet. These four
engineers were in their time, the late 1920s and the 1930s, pioneers of particle mea-
surement. Professor Paul Rosin (1890–1967) had since the 1920s a private engineering
office for problems of coal research in Dresden. One of the big problems he tackled
was the question of coal particle size and the behaviour of coal particles in various
technological processes. In 1925 the young Erich Rammler (1901–1986) began his
work in Rosin’s office. He promoted in 1927 to Dr.-Ing. at Bergakademie Freiberg,
based on results he obtained in Rosin’s office. Rosin and Rammler learned in this
time that particle size distributions usually are skewed; they compared these distri-
butions with the Maxwell velocity distribution and Wien’s law of radiation known to
them from physics (Rosin and Rammler 1927). Many statistical analyses led them to
a probability density function of particle size (e.g.: diameter):

f (x) = ax m exp(−bx n ) for x ≥ 0, (1)

where a, b, m and n are positive parameters. (Here and at other places not the authors’
original notation is used.) In their time they had as calculation equipment only loga-
rithm tables and slide-rules – the modern reader may imagine (if having still an idea
of these old-fashioned techniques) how complicated the numerical work was with the
distribution (1). And it is impossible to obtain a tractable formula for the distribution
function. Karl Sperling then had the simplifying idea to set

m = n − 1, (2)

which eliminated one of the parameters. In this way R, R and S arrived at the Weibull
distribution,

f (x) = bnx n−1 exp(−bx n ) for x ≥ 0, (3)

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published in Rosin et al. (1933). From then on the term RRS-distribution was used. It
turned out that the distribution (3) is also suitable for other particles, e.g. of cement
(Rosin and Rammler 1933b) and ceramic material (Rosin and Rammler 1934). Thus
R, R and S were able to characterize large particle collectives by two parameters b
and n. They developed elegant graphical techniques for the statistical work with their
distribution, which are quite similar to the later developed techniques for the Weibull
distribution, the today so-called Weibull plot. The idea is simply to take two times
logarithms, which leads to a straight line for the graph of the distribution function.
A suitable calculation paper was developed and is still available under the German
name “RRSB-Netz” according to DIN 66145. It is popular in particle measurement.
Rosin was eager to make their work known internationally, and so R and R pub-
lished their ideas also in an English journal, see Rosin and Rammler (1933a). This
paper was successful: two prominent British coal engineers, John Godolphin Bennett
and Harold Heywood, understood the value of the RRS distribution and welcomed the
paper in letters to the editor of the Journal of the Institute of Fuel. (Bennett was Director
of British Coal Utilization Research Association and is also known for his books on
psychology and spirituality. Heywood was professor at the Loughborough University
of Technology and is known for his research in particle characterization and solar
energy.) Later Bennett recommended to rewrite formula (3) in the more elegant form
 α−1   α 
x x
f (x) = α exp − for x ≥ 0, (4)
β β

see Bennett (1936). This form is today standard in the engineering literature for the
(two-parameter) Weibull density function. The parameter β is the 63.2%-quantile of
the distribution. The corresponding distribution function is
  α 
x
F(x) = 1 − exp − for x ≥ 0. (5)
β

Since then the distribution was called RRSB distribution, in Germany, but also in other
European countries. (See in the internet, under “RRSB”.) Rammler (1937) is a survey
of the state-of-art of the application of the RRSB distribution in general.
It must be said that in none of the papers of the RRSB group a stochastic model
leading to the distribution is discussed. The equations (1) and (3) were considered
strictly empirical results.
The close and fruitful cooperation between Rosin and Rammler ended in the late
1930s because of the political conditions in Germany. Rosin was a Jew and emigrated
just at the right time, March 1938, to England, where he died in 1967. It is not known
whether he still was active in the field of the RRSB distribution. (Bennett had then
other interests and about Sperling’s fate the author is not informed.) Erich Rammler
bought in 1936 Rosin’s office in Dresden, in a fair way, with the right on Rosin’s side
to buy it back in better times. After the war R and R had friendly contact via mail.
In the bombing of Dresden in February 13, 1945, the office and all its equipment was
totally destroyed. Later, in 1949, Rammler was appointed professor at Bergakademie
Freiberg. He did not further develop but continuously applied the theory around the

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RRSB distribution. All his power he invested in his successful work for the lignite
technology in East Germany.
In direct reference to RR the paper Brown and Wohletz (1995) was published. The
authors also considered fragmentation of particles and gave a plausible model for frag-
ment particle size, which uses a branching tree of cracks that shows geometric scale
invariance i. e. a fractal behaviour, where the term “fractal” is used as in Mandelbrot
(1978).

3 Weibull

In 1939, RRSB got a strong competitor: the Swedish Waloddi Weibull (1887–1979),
professor at the Royal Technical University (KTM) at Stockholm. He published the
papers Weibull (1939a,b), in which he applied the distribution given by (5) to just
that problem which is today perhaps one of the main application fields of the Weibull
distribution: random strength of materials. In these papers there is no reference to any
paper of RRSB, even not to Rosin and Rammler (1933c) in the British journal Pro-
ceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, where the distribution discussed
here also appears. (This journal as well as the Journal of Fuel were in the 1930s pres-
ent in the library of KTM. However, Weibull was probably not interested in coal and
particle problems.) Weibull’s papers could hardly find many readers, as written short
before World War 2 and not in a journal but in proceeding volumes, however, of the
prestigious KTM.
In his paper Weibull (1939a), Weibull started with the integrated hazard rate (x)
(not using the name and with another symbol) and argued that he wanted to have an
increasing function for this. For him the most plausible form for (x) was just
 α
x
(x) = for x ≥ 0, (6)
β

which leads via

F(x) = 1 − exp(−(x)) for x ≥ 0 (7)

to Eq. (5). So he started with the RRSB form. (Instead of α he used the symbol m,
which today stands for the “Weibull modulus”.)
Weibull was in 1939 not theoretically superior over RRSB, nor did he use a math-
ematical or physical model to explain the form (6). His arguments for the choice of
(6) were plausibility (“the simplest mathematical expression”) and a lot of empirical
results.
From his standpoint it was only a little step towards the three-parameter Weibull
distribution
   
x − x0 α
F(x) = 1 − exp − for x ≥ x0 , (8)
β

which for him belonged just to another hazard rate.

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However, from the standpoint of the theory of strength of materials his papers
of 1939 are extremely important. There appears the idea of the weakest link at least
implicitly. While he does not speak about inhomogeneous Poisson processes (as Jeulin
1994) he speaks about “weak places” in the material and mentions the fact that the
cumulative hazard rate (x) and a quantity which would today be called “cumu-
lative intensity function” coincide. In the 1980s some papers were published which
reported on properties of a “Weibull-Poisson process”, see Hsieh (2011). Weibull does
not mention the Poisson distribution and the Poisson process—nevertheless he uses
implicitly the idea of an inhomogeneous Poisson process. However, he discusses an
important problem in the statistical theory of material strength, the volume law for the
mean strength of samples of different volumes under homogeneous flaw distribution.
Finally, Weibull considers the limit m → ∞, which leads to the deterministic case, in
Weibull’s words the “classical theory of strength.” Thus a term as Weibull theory for
the ideas in this paragraph is highly justified.
In the 1940s Weibull then had the time to think about the distribution and its applica-
tions. This led him to the extremely successful paper Weibull (1951) in a prestigious US
journal. In this paper he only briefly described the mathematics of Weibull (1939a), but
now presented an impressive series of examples, which showed the wide applicability
of the distribution (5). He used as examples yield strength of steel, size distribution
of fly ash, fiber strength of cotton, length of Cyrtoidae (some fossils), fatigue life of
steel, stature of adult males and breadth of beans of some plant. (In the context of ash
particle size one could expect some reference to RRSB, but there is not any.)
Weibull’s paper was even discussed; questionable is who invited the discutants, and
probably nobody had the idea to ask one of the RRSB people. Nevertheless, Rosin and
Rammler were mentioned in the discussion, by the American engineer R. A. Mugele.
However, he referred only to the paper Rosin and Rammler (1927), in which the
RRSB distribution did not yet appear, and did not mention the English papers of 1933
or Bennett (1936), but wrote that in the case of x0 = 0 Weibull’s distribution reduces to
the Rosin-Rammler distribution. What had happened if Mugele had mentioned RRSB
in the form of Rosin and Rammler (1933a) and Bennett (1936) and emphasized that
the rights of four scientists of different nations were violated?
But Mugele did not so, and the excellent marketing of Weibull by his paper decided
the game. Weibull continued his mechanical-statistical work in the U.S.A., together
with such great scientists as Freudenthal and Gumbel and so he can be seen as one of
the creators of probabilistic mechanics for structures and materials.
Isolated in East Germany, Rammler learned about the name “Weibull distribution”
only in 1973, at the Harold Heywood memorial symposium in Loughborough, where
he was an invited speaker. This was a big shock for him. In the paper Rammler (1974)
he commented the situation from his standpoint and explained his and his colleagues
priority. He disliked Weibull’s wording in the 1951 paper that “The only merit of this
df is to be found in the fact that it is the simplest mathematical expression of the appro-
priate form.”, remembering “the years of trouble” (as written in Rosin and Rammler
1933c) and ignoring Weibull’s many statistical analyses presented in Weibull (1939a).
Then he wrote that it is perhaps not a good idea to name scientific findings such as the
RRSB or Weibull distribution after the names of the researchers who were so lucky to
propose these as the first to the scientific community. He wrote that neutral names were

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better; for the Weibull distribution he recommended the name “powered-exponential”

distribution.

4 Extreme value theory

It is easy to show that the minimum X n = min X i of n independent identically Weibull

distributed random variables is again Weibull distributed. If the original parameters
are α and β as in (5), the parameters of the minimum distribution are nα and β. This
can be seen in some relation to the weakest link assumption in the Weibull theory.
However, this is no explanation for the occurrence of the Weibull distribution—the
occurrence of the Weibull distribution of the X i is not explained.
More insight is given by the occurrence of the Weibull distribution in limit theorems
in extreme value theory, as explained in Kotz and Nadarajah (2000), section 1.3 and
p. 59. The classical papers Fréchet (1927) and Fisher and Tippett (1928) can be seen
as close to the origin of the Weibull distribution. “While Fréchet (1927) had identi-
fied one possible limit distribution for the largest order statistic, Fisher and Tippett,
1928, showed that extreme limit distributions can only be of three types.” (Kotz and
Nadarajah 2000). Both papers consider the maximum of random variables and for a
non-mathematician it is difficult to identify there the Weibull distribution.
In extreme value theory not the minimum of random variables is considerd, but
limits of sequences of the form an X n + bn , with
X n = min{X 1 , . . . , X n }
and suitable an and bn . The three possible forms of limit distributions have their respec-
tive domains of attraction. For the Weibull distribution possible “parent distributions”
(of the X n ) are the Gamma, uniform and Pareto distributions.

5 Conclusions

Today, the name “Weibull distribution” is well established. Nevertheless, it may make
sense to change the name and to speak about the “powered exponential distribution”
instead. Also, serious probability and statistics textbooks that refer to the theory’s
history should mention both RRSB and extreme value theory. A good example is the
“Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences”, which has a reference to Rosin and Rammler
(1933a), see Antle and Bain (2006).
It might be advisable that the statistical community were more careful when naming
statistical objects after (living) persons; neutral technical names should generally be
preferred.

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