Since the discovery of strangeness in the 1940's, flavour-charged particles have been a research focus in high-energy physics. Quite simple to be produced through nuclear interactions, but peculiar in their decays, they allowed pushing forward the knowledge in the field for almost a century: new quantum numbers, predictions of new quarks, violation of discrete symmetries, high-sensitivity tests of standard model predictions, etc. We will review the various discoveries with a historical approach, highlighting the brilliant ideas as well as the dead ends, and we will give a glimpse of the possible future developments.