The Large Hadron Collider from Conception to Commissioning: A Personal Recollection

It is generally accepted that the birth of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was in the Lausanne Workshop in 1984, where machine builders and experimentalists first got together to discuss the next big project for CERN. In reality, the seeds were sown much earlier, with the construction of the Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, followed by the proton–antiproton colliders at CERN and at Fermilab. In this article I try to give a historical perspective on how the LHC came to be, as well as my own account of some of the political, technical and financial challenges that had to be met in order to make it a reality.