<p>A philosophical micro-history of early quantum theory is developed through an indiciary–abductive approach. Against narratives centred on axioms, formalism, or abrupt scientific ‘revolutions,’ the analysis reconstructs three early quantum episodes—Planck, Einstein, and Bohr—as clue-sensitive episodes of hypothesis appraisal under weak and heterogeneous evidence. Drawing on Ginzburg’s indiciary paradigm, Peircean abduction, and recent work on epistemic aesthetics, the reconstruction develops a rubric for analysing how local anomalies, inherited constraints, and evaluative form-values jointly shaped the comparative plausibility of candidate hypotheses. The comparative result is deliberately partial rather than total: Einstein weakly dominates Planck in the reconstructive profile, whereas Einstein and Bohr remain incomparable. Early quantum theory is thus interpreted not as a simple repudiation of classical rationality, but as a series of disciplined conjectural reorganisations in which empirical resistance, economy, limit coherence, unificatory reach, and prospective fecundity interacted in historically localised ways. The reconstruction remains intentionally limited in scope: it complements rather than replaces Kuhnian historiography and does not claim to exhaust broader social accounts of scientific change.</p>