The beginning of string theory: a historical sketch

In this note we follow the historical development of the ideas that led to the formulation of String Theory. We start from the inspired guess of Veneziano and its extension to the scattering of $N$ scalar particles, then we describe how the study of its factorization properties allowed to identify the physical spectrum making the string worldsheet manifest and finally we discuss how the critical values of the intercept of the Regge trajectory and of the critical dimension were fixed to 1 and 26.
Comment: Latex 18 pages, 3 figures, use svmult.cls. Contribution to the volume "String theory and fundamental interactions", dedicated to Gabriele Veneziano on his 65th birthday