The origin of the distribution is the observation by Ralph Bagnold, published in his book The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (1941), that the logarithm of the histogram of the empirical size distribution of sand deposits tends to form a hyperbola. This observation was formalised mathematically by Ole Barndorff-Nielsen in a paper in 1977,[1] where he also introduced the generalised hyperbolic distribution, using the fact the a hyperbolic distribution is a random mixture of normal distributions.
^Barndorff-Nielsen, Ole (1977). "Exponentially decreasing distributions for the logarithm of particle size". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. 353 (1674). The Royal Society: 401–409. doi:10.1098/rspa.1977.0041. JSTOR79167.