History of high-energy neutrino astronomy

This talk sketches the main milestones of the path towards cubic kilometer neutrino telescopes. It starts with the first conceptual ideas in the late 1950s and describes the emergence of concepts for detectors with a realistic discovery potential in the 1970s and 1980s. After the pioneering project DUMAND close to Hawaii was terminated in 1995, the further development was carried by NT200 in Lake Baikal, AMANDA at the South Pole and ANTARES in the Mediterranean Sea. In 2013, more than half a century after the first concepts, IceCube has discovered extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos and opened a new observational window to the cosmos - marking a milestone along a journey which is far from being finished.