A mechanism explaining a strong enhancement of nonleptonic weak decays was suggested in 1975, later to be dubbed the penguin. This mechanism extends Wilson's ideas about the operator product expansion at short distances and reveals an intricate interplay of subtle features of the theory such as heavy quark masses in Glashow–Iliopoulos–Maini cancellation, light quarks shaping the chiral properties of QCD, etc. The penguins have subsequently evolved to play a role in a variety of fields in present-day particle phenomenology. I will describe the history of this idea and review its subsequent development. The recent measurement of direct CP violation in K decays gives a new confirmation of the penguin mechanism.