We show that the distribution of the time delay for one-dimensional random potentials is universal in the high energy or weak disorder limit. Our analytical results are in excellent agreement with extensive numerical simulations carried out on samples whose sizes are large compared to the localisation length (localised regime). The case of small samples is also discussed (ballistic regime). We provide a physical argument which explains in a quantitative way the origin of the exponential divergence of the moments. The occurence of a log-normal tail for finite size systems is analysed. Finally, we present exact results in the low energy limit which clearly show a departure from the universal behaviour.The problem of quantum scattering by chaotic or disordered systems is encountered in many fields ranging from atomic or molecular physics as well as in the scattering of electromagnetic microwaves. Some properties of the scattering process are well captured through the concept of time delay. This quantity, which goes back to Eisenbud and Wigner [7], is related to the time spent in the interaction region by a wave packet of energy peaked at E. It can be expressed in terms of the derivative of the S matrix with respect to the energy. In the context of chaotic scattering the approach based on random matrix theory (RMT) provides a statistical description of the time delays. This problem was first studied by a supersymmetric approach [11] and in [13] by using a statistical analysis. This latter work provides a derivation for the one channel case for the different universality classes. Recently it served as a starting point for [3] where the N channel distribution is shown to be given by the Laguerre ensemble of RMT. In spite of its success, such a description by RMT is not entirely satisfactory, in particular it does not apply to strictly one-dimensional systems [10] for which strong localisation effects occur. Furthermore it does not shed much light on the physical mechanisms which are responsible for the universal distribution. In this work we explore another approach by considering the scattering by a one-dimensional random potential. In this case the existence of universal distributions was first conjectured in [6] on the basis of a comparative study of two different models. This was further supported by [16] where the random potential is still of a different kind.The purpose of this letter is to present a new derivation that accounts for the universality and also to provide a physical picture that explains the origin of the algebraic tail of the distribution in terms of resonances. Further details will be given elsewhere [22]. To begin with, let us briefly recall the model. We consider the Schrödinger equation on the half line x 0: