I will give a historical account of the developments leading up to the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions, as I saw them from my standpoint in Imperial College London.
I will describe the state of physics in the 1950s, the aim of finding a unified theory of various interactions, the obstacles encountered in trying to unify the weak and electromagnetic interactions, and their eventual resolution, with a brief discussion of the later history culminating in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.