The development of particle accelerators and of particle physics co-evolved hand-in-hand; from Crookes tubes and the discovery of the electron to the LHC and the discovery of the Higgs boson. I highlight the transformative "great ideas" and the technological advances that made new types of accelerators possible and link the new accelerators to the discoveries they made. At the same time new discoveries led to open questions that demanded new accelerators, a process that resulted in the standard model of particle physics. This dialectic relationship went on for most of the past 150 years and provides the storyline throughout this seminar.