A historical summary is made on the measurements concerning the rising total hadron-hadron cross sections at high energies. The first part of this paper concerns the total cross section measurements performed at the Brookhaven, Serpukhov and Fermilab fixed target accelerators; then the measurements at the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), and at the CERN and at the Tevatron Fermilab proton-antiproton colliders; finally the cosmic ray measurements at even higher energies. A short discussion on Conclusions and Perspectives follows.