Gravitational Wave Discovery: The First Decade

A decade on from the first observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger the detection of gravitational waves has become routine. The increasing sensitivity of the gravitational wave detectors and the coordination of the global detector network has yielded significant increases in the rate of observed events and their signal to noise ratio, generating increasing scientific payoff through gravitational waves themselves and honing the gravitational wave event based alert system for multi-messenger events. In this talk I will provide an overview of gravitational wave detectors and the network, review the last decade of instrumental upgrades in the gravitational wave network, and discuss the upgrades currently underway and plans for the future of the field.