Historical Inaccuracies
Many popular histories of physics, as well as a number of physics textbooks, present an incorrect version of the history of the ultraviolet catastrophe. In this version, the "catastrophe" was first noticed by Planck, who developed his formula in response. In fact Planck never concerned himself with this aspect of the problem, because he did not believe that the equipartition theorem was fundamental – his motivation for introducing "quanta" was entirely different. That Planck's proposal happened to provide a solution for it was realized much later, as stated above. Though this has been known by historians for many decades, the historically incorrect version persists, in part because Planck's actual motivations for the proposal of the quantum are complicated and difficult to summarize to a lay audience.
Read more about this topic: Ultraviolet Catastrophe
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“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)