Comments and references relating to early work in field electron emission

This paper adds to the contents of an earlier review entitled ‘On the early history of field emission including attempts of tunnelling spectroscopy’ (Prog. Surf. Sci. 1993; 42: 101) and covers the period up to 1958. In particular, it notes the work on (what one can now recognize as) field-emission-induced discharge phenomena in the period 1878–1905 and the work on the developing applications of field emission microscopy in the period 1952–1958, in what had become Drechsler's group in Berlin. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.