Neutron backscattering was proposed by Heinz Maier-Leibnitz in 1966, and realized by some of his students in a test setup at the research reactor FRM I in Garching bei München, Germany. Following this successful demonstration of principle, permanent spectrometers were built at Forschungszentrum Jülich and at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL). Later instruments brought an extension of the accessible momentum transfer range (IN13 at ILL), the introduction of focussing optics (IN16 at ILL), and a further increase of intensity by a compact design with a phase-space transform chopper (HFBS at NIST, SPHERES at FRM II, IN16B at the Institut Laue-Langevin).