This is a first foray into the historical start and early years of chemometrics from about 1972 onwards. We have gathered interviews with three originators (Kowalski, Wold and Massart) as well as with a selected group of six other well-known chemometricians who gradually became active in the 1970s (Christie, Clementi, Hopke, Martens, Brown and Deming). The interviews include amongst a host of subjective recollections a succinct record of the key historical literature as highlighted by the interviewees' own rankings of 'earliest' and 'best'. A discussion of the most general commonalities in these interviews together with other historical material is presented in the second part of the paper.