At 9.30am BST, Wednesday 10th September 2008 protons were spun round the giant particle accelerator's 27 kilometre-long circular beam tunnel at just a fraction under the speed of light.
Getting the beam to circulate all the way round the 100 metre-deep underground tunnel was originally expected to take most of the day.
In fact the scientists also managed to send a beam in the opposite direction by about 2pm BST.
Later the particles will be made to smash into each other at energy levels up to seven times higher than any seen before.
The collisions, in four huge detectors arranged around the ring, will create conditions as tightly squeezed and hot as they were less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang which gave birth to the universe.
Temperatures at that point at almost the beginning of time, around 14 billion years ago, reached a million billion degrees C.
The LHC is so large it straddles the borders of Switzerland and France between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains.
During the "switch on" today the eyes of the world were on a Briton - LHC project leader Dr Lyndon Evans, from Aberdare in south Wales, who counted down the launch at the control centre at CERN, the European nuclear research organisation in Geneva.
Looking relaxed in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, he joked: "Five, four, three, two, one.. nothing" before a blip appeared on a computer signalling that the machine was working.
A number of key players in the project are from the University of Liverpool, which is hosting this year's British Association Festival of Science.
Speaking at the festival, Professor Philip Allport, head of particle physics at the university, said: "It has gone even more smoothly than those who built the machine anticipated. More
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