Quantum History Part 1: From Planck's Quanta to the Idea of a Quantum Computer

Updated 2026-10-11 | 4 min read | QUANTUM (QNT) community

A small puzzle with a big answer

Our story begins in 1900, with hot glowing objects. Classical physics could not explain the colors of light they gave off. Max Planck found that the numbers worked if energy was exchanged in tiny discrete chunks, which he later called quanta. By most accounts he saw this as a mathematical trick, not a new law of nature. He did not know he had just opened the door to the whole century of physics that followed, and to the machines this site is about.

The early quantum years: 1905 to 1924

In 1905 Albert Einstein used the same idea to explain the photoelectric effect, treating light as made of packets of energy. In 1913 Niels Bohr proposed a model of the hydrogen atom where electrons sit only in certain allowed orbits, which explained the neat lines of color that hydrogen gives off. In 1922 the Stern and Gerlach experiment showed that spin, a kind of built-in twist of particles, comes in discrete values. In 1924 Louis de Broglie suggested that matter itself behaves like a wave. Each step added a strange new rule, and each rule matched experiments.

That is the optimistic part of this era: nature kept confirming ideas that sounded absurd. Strange did not mean wrong.

1925 to 1930: the real theory arrives

In 1925 Werner Heisenberg developed matrix mechanics, and the Born and Jordan paper of that year is reported as the first to use the term quantum mechanics. In 1926 Erwin Schrodinger published wave mechanics, and he soon showed it was equivalent to Heisenberg's version. In 1927 Heisenberg gave an early form of the uncertainty principle, and Davisson and Germer showed electrons diffract like waves. In 1930 Paul Dirac published an influential textbook that introduced the bra and ket notation still used in every quantum computing course today.

The Copenhagen interpretation, linked to Bohr and Heisenberg, stressed that quantum mechanics gives probabilities. That single idea is the root of what we now call superposition: a system can be described as a blend of possibilities until you measure it.

Entanglement: the weirdest idea becomes a resource

Through the 1930s and for decades after, physicists argued about the strangest consequence of the theory, now called entanglement, where two particles share a linked description however far apart they are. For a long time this was treated as a puzzle for philosophers. The quantum computing story is partly the story of turning that puzzle into fuel. Today entanglement is a measurable, engineered resource, and nothing in the later chapters would work without it.

The missing ingredient: information

For most of the twentieth century quantum mechanics was used to explain things that already existed: atoms, chemistry, lasers, transistors. The theory powered a great deal of everyday technology, but nobody was designing computers around its rules. Computer science grew up on a separate track. The two fields had different languages and different heroes.

The bridge started to appear at the end of the 1970s. According to the timeline compiled on Wikipedia, Paul Benioff described the first quantum mechanical model of a computer in 1980 (he had submitted it in 1979), based on describing Turing machines with the Schrodinger equation. That was a modest but crucial move. It showed that a computer could in principle obey quantum rules all the way down, rather than just being built from quantum-made parts.

Why this era still matters

• Everything is old physics, used in a new way. A modern qubit is a controlled version of the same spin, light and atomic levels these pioneers studied.
• Strange results kept surviving tests. That track record is why serious investors and governments treat quantum technology as engineering, not fantasy.
• The computing question was asked late. The theory was around for more than half a century before someone asked what it could compute. That suggests there may still be uses nobody has thought of.

What comes next

The next chapter, Feynman, Deutsch, Shor and Grover, is where the idea becomes a field. For a short list version of the whole story see Quantum Computing Timeline, and for the basics start with What Is Quantum Computing? A Plain English Guide.

A note on honesty: dates in the early quantum era are often given as the year of a paper, a lecture or a later textbook account, and historians sometimes disagree about who deserves credit. Treat the years above as the commonly cited ones.

Sources and further reading

• Wikipedia: History of quantum mechanics
• Wikipedia: Timeline of quantum computing and communication
• Wikipedia: Quantum computing (history section)

Reported as of 2026-10-09. Company claims are the companies' own unless a source says otherwise. Educational content only, not financial advice. The QNT memecoin is independent of Quantinuum Ltd and every other company, lab or government.

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• Quantum History Part 2: Feynman, Deutsch, Shor and Grover (1981 to 1996)
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• Quantum Computing Timeline: Key Milestones From 1981 to Today
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• What Is Quantum Computing? A Plain English Guide
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• Superposition Explained in Plain English
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