As early as 1934 it was hypothesized that cosmic rays could produce nuclides by interaction with Earth surface materials (Grosse 1934). In the late 1940s, radiocarbonproduced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere was discovered, and developed into a widely used tool for dating organic matter (Libby 1946, Libby et al. 1949). The discovery and application of in situ-produced cosmogenic nuclidesin terrestrial material took off sluggishly. 36Cl was the first in situ-produced nuclide detected in rocks (Davis and Schaeffer 1955). At that time Davis and Schaeffer (1955) also developed the main methodological principles for exposure dating. It took more than 20 years before the next in situ study reported cosmogenic Xe(124Xe, 128Xe and 131Xe) in barite from southern Africa (Srinivasan 1976), followed by measurements and production rate estimates of cosmogenic nuclides derived from airplane wreckage (Yokoyama et al. 1977). In the meteoritic and lunar scientific community, meanwhile, cosmogenic nuclides have been a routinely used research tool since the 1960s (Reedy et al. 1983, Wieler 2002). Also, atmospheric and oceanic sciences have utilized cosmogenic nuclides since that time (Lal et al. 1958, Lal and Peters 1962, 1967). This early adoption of the ‘cosmogenic tool’ was mostly due to the fact that cosmogenic nuclide production rates in extraterrestrial material and the atmosphere are several orders of magnitude higher than at the Earth's surface, and therefore detection was analytically feasible at an earlier stage.