In 1926 Pascual Jordan published the first attempt to quantize the electromagnetic field. In a joint paper with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg he considered the field inside a cavity as a superposition of quantum harmonic oscillators. In his calculation he found that in addition to the "thermal energy" of the oscillators there also had to exist an infinite zero-point energy term. He was able to obtain the same fluctuation formula that Einstein had obtained in 1909. However, Jordan did not think that his infinite zero-point energy term was "real", writing to Einstein that "it is just a quantity of the calculation having no direct physical meaning". Jordan found a way to get rid of the infinite term, publishing a joint work with Pauli in 1928, performing what has been called "the first infinite subtraction, or renormalisation, in quantum field theory".