A Brief History of the Study of High Energy Cosmic Rays using Arrays of Surface Detectors

A brief history of the development of surface detectors for the study of the high-energy cosmic rays is presented. The paper is based on an invited talk given at UHECR2022 held in L'Aquila, 3 - 7 October 2022. In a complementary talk, P Sokolsky discussed the development of the fluorescence technique for air-shower detection.