The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the flagship particle accelerator that will undoubtedly shape the high-energy frontier for the next two decades. The project was approved in 1996 and the collider commissioned in 2010. During the first period of operation, the LHC delivered about 25 fb-1 of data from p-p collisions at √s of 7-8 TeV to the ATLAS and CMS experiments resulting in a wealth of new physics results, including the discovery of a Higgs-like boson. I will present in this talk the key events that marked the construction and commissioning of the collider, illustrated with examples and surprises along this long road, some of them quite unexpected.