The term “order statistics” was introduced only in 1942, by Wilks. However, the subject is much older, astronomers having long been interested in estimates of location beyond the sample mean. By early in the nineteenth century measures considered included the median, symmetrically trimmed means, the midrange, and related functions of order statistics. In 1818, Laplace obtained (essentially) the distribution of the rth-order statistic in random samples and also derived a condition on the parent density under which the median is asymptotically more efficient than the mean. Other topics considered are of more recent origin: extreme-value theory and the estimation of location and scale parameters by order statistics.