The Large Hadron Collider—Background and History

This introductory chapter gives a short account of the history of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, i.e. it describes the rationale for the LHC, the situation of high energy physics in the period in which the LHC was initially conceived, and the development of the project from first ideas to first beams in the machine. In doing so, some emphasis is put on the comparison of the LHC with other \({\textit{pp}}\) or \(p{\bar{{\textit{p}}}}\) collider projects, which are also discussed from a historical point of view. Finally, the development of the LHC experimental collaborations is sketched.