The development of the helicon or toroidal ring began with André-Marie Ampère, who in 1823 proposed tiny magnetic "loops of charge" to explain the attractive force between current elements. In that same era Carl Friedrich Gauss and Michael Faraday also uncovered foundational laws of classical electrodynamics, later collected by James Maxwell as Maxwell's equations. When Maxwell expressed the laws of Gauss, Faraday, and Ampère in differential form, he assumed point particles, an assumption that remains foundational to relativity theory and quantum mechanics today. In 1867 Lord Kelvin suggested that the vortex rings of a perfect fluid discovered by Hermann von Helmholtz represented "the only true atoms ". Then shortly before 1900, as scientists still debated over the very existence of atoms, J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford sparked a revolution with experiments confirming the existence and properties of electrons, protons, and nuclei. Max Planck added to the fire when he solved the blackbody radiation problem by assuming not only discrete particles, but discrete frequencies of radiation emanating from these "particles" or " resonators ". Planck's famous paper, which incidentally calculated both the Planck constant h and the Boltzmann constant k B, suggested that something in the "resonators" themselves provided these discrete frequencies.