Résumé
Economics has been a non-experimental science for a long time. In just a few decades economics was profoundly transformed: today the experimental method is a legitimate tool in the hands of economists. A proper history of experimental economics is yet to be written. The purpose of the article is just to give an outline of this history, taking account of the chronology, focusing on the key moments of this evolution, identifying the pioneers and the leaders of the main research programs. One proposes to divide the history into for great approximate stages named: (i) the emergence: from the end of the Second World War to the very early 1960s (ii) the starting: the 1960s and the 1970s (iii) the take off: the 1980s (iv) the maturity: from the middle of the 1990s.