From the history of the Balmer series, we can understand that physicists' experiments on the atomic emission spectrum started in the 1550s. But they lacked an empirical formula to imagine the wavelengths of spectral lines of an element. In 1885, the Balmer equation was the first empirical formula discovered to estimate the wavelengths of spectral emissions in the hydrogen spectrum. The Balmer equation was given by the mathematician Johann Jakob Balmer.