  In 2007 we were part of a team that discovered the so-called ``Lorimer
Burst'', the first example of a new class of objects now known as fast radio
bursts (FRBs). These enigmatic events are only a few ms in duration and occur
at random locations on the sky at a rate of a few thousand per day. Several
thousand FRBs are currently known. While it is now well established that they
have a cosmological origin, and about 10\% of all currently known sources have
been seen to exhibit multiple bursts, the origins of these enigmatic sources
are currently poorly understood. In this article, we review the discovery of
FRBs and present some of the highlights from the vast body of work by an
international community. Following a brief overview of the scale of the visible
Universe in \S 1, we describe the key moments in radio astronomy (\S 2) that
led up to the discovery of the Lorimer burst (\S 3). Early efforts to find more
FRBs are described in \S 4 which led to the discovery of the first repeating
source (\S 5). In \S 6, as we close out on the second decade of FRBs, we
outline some of the many open questions in the field and look ahead to the
coming years where many surprises are surely in store.
