The compact–open topology for function spaces is usually attributed to R. H. Fox in 1945 [16]; and indeed, there is no earlier publication to attribute it to. But it is clear from Fox's paper that the idea of the compact–open topology, and its notable success in locally compact spaces, were already familiar. The topology of course goes back to Riemann; and to generalize to locally compact spaces needs only a definition or two. The actual contributions of Fox were (1) to formulate the partial result, and the problem of extending it, clearly and categorically; (2) to show that in separable metric spaces there is no extension beyond locally compact spaces; (3) to anticipate, partially and somewhat awkwardly, the idea of changing the category so as to save the functorial equation. (Scholarly reservations: Fox attributes the question to Hurewicz, and doubtless Hurewicz had a share in (1). As for (2), when Fox's paper was published R. Arens was completing a dissertation which gave a more general result [1] – though worse formulated.)
On spaces with linearlty homeomorphic function spaces in the compact open topology
