  In this talk, I recall the history of the development of the unified
electroweak theory, incorporating the symmetry-breaking Higgs mechanism, as I
saw it from my standpoint as a member of Abdus Salam's group at Imperial
College. I start by describing the state of physics in the years after the
Second World War, explain how the goal of a unified gauge theory of weak and
electromagnetic interactions emerged, the obstacles encountered, in particular
the Goldstone theorem, and how they were overcome, followed by a brief account
of more recent history, culminating in the historic discovery of the Higgs
boson in 2012.
