Abstract
Fast radio bursts are millisecond-duration pulses of cosmological origin that were discovered by an undergraduate student at West Virginia University in 2007 in data collected by the Parkes radio telescope in 2001. They show amazing promise as probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe and provide a new window into the population(s) of compact objects at vast distances. Although much of the details as to their origins remain to be discovered, in this talk I will attempt to give an account of their discovery and what we have learned in the past sixteen years.