An important missed connection is obvious today: neither Michelson nor Rayleigh ever paid any attention to the work of Heinrich Rubens (1865-1922), then professor of experimental physics at the University of Berlin, who from 1910 onward published interferograms indistinguishable from modern ones and made trial-and-error reconstructions of the spectra. In this primitive way, Rubens actually had solved the phase problem and removed the ambiguity that always plagued Michelson.
by Pierre Connes, Michael Smyth, Armand Hadni, and Xavier Gerbaux