The exploration of hot hadron matter and of multiparticle production has a long history initiated by theoretical work on multiparticle production by Enrico Fermi in the US and Lev Landau in the USSR. These efforts paved the way to the development in the early 1960s of the thermal description of multiparticle production and the statistical bootstrap model by Rolf Hagedorn. These developments led to search for and discovery of quark-gluon plasma. Onset of the production of this new form of matter remains under active investigation.