Linear Estimates of Parameters in the Extreme Value Distribution

have been much discussed in the statistical literature, notably in a series of papers by Gumbel, which culminated in Gumbel (1958). The context in which such a discussion has taken place has usually been that of exceptional phenomena such as floods, droughts, etc. and the distribution has been little used as a model for the description of ordinary events. Recently, however, interest in this distribution has been stimulated by the realisation that life testing procedures based on the exponential distribution are very sensitive to departures from this distribution (see, for example, Zelen and Dannemiller, 1961) and that the Weibull distribution