 Why was this issue of the Anschaulichkeit of quantum mechanics such a prominent concern to Heisenberg? This question has already been considered by a number of commentators (Jammer 1974; Miller 1982; de Regt 1997; Beller 1999). For the answer, it turns out, we must go back a little in time. In 1925 Heisenberg had developed the first coherent mathematical formalism for quantum theory (Heisenberg 1925). His leading idea was that only those quantities that are in principle observable should play a role in the theory, and that all attempts to form a picture of what goes on inside the atom should be avoided. In atomic physics the observational data were obtained from spectroscopy and associated with atomic transitions. Thus, Heisenberg was led to consider the “transition quantities” as the basic ingredients of the theory. Max Born, later that year, realized that the transition quantities obeyed the rules of matrix calculus, a branch of mathematics that was not so well-known then as it is now. In a famous series of papers Heisenberg, Born and Jordan developed this idea into the matrix mechanics version of quantum theory.