I took a moment and checked all the references within the time I allowed. Including a book by Linden Harrison called Current sources & Voltage References, which is an historical reference of the topic. The technique using discrete devices for this arrangement appears to have had a very short life-span and, so far as I've been able to find, didn't acquire a recognized name.
- National Semi was started and photolithography was invented at Bell Labs in the same year, 1958. And Clarence Zener, a researcher at Westinghouse, invented the zener diode at about the same time. Prior to this point, current sources were built with vacuum tubes.
- It wasn't until 1959 when Jean Hoerni invented of the planar structure for the bipolar. And it wasn't until the early 1960's that these became available, commercially.
- The silicon bipolar analog IC very shortly later became a practical reality in the late 1960s and their performance greatly outperformed discrete device designs and most subsequent efforts were focused on using these much better performing current sources as subsections of high-function, high-value ICs components like opamps.
Here's a short list of the discrete designs I could find in the literature, starting around 1962 and up to about 1972:
simulate this circuit– Schematic created using CircuitLab
I didn't find acquired names for any of them. Just creativity and publication. There are still more. But integrated circuits took over. It was a creative time. But it was a short time.
I don't have time to fully search the scholarly literature. It's possible that there's a paper somewhere discussing how to design this particular discrete topology well and to discuss physical construction details that may further improve its performance, along with experimental results confirming their approach. But this EESE answer is an attempt worth considering.
There are current mirrors, including a variety of them from Wilson. And Widlar explored more than a few different approaches, including one with beta-compensation and/or with emitter degeneration, all of which probably carry his name. (Those with emitter degeneration would be useful for discrete devices. And I didn't include that one, above.) And finally another developed by Wyatt, while at Honeywell, called a Cascode Peaking current source.
Sorry about not finding a specific name for this one. Perhaps you can interest an historical researcher who specializes in the area of electronic nomenclature.
