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Everything with mass has a corresponding equivalent amount of energy. Everything with energy has a corresponding equivalent amount of mass. These fundamental quantities are related to each other by Albert Einstein's famous equation:
The equivalent energy (E), can be calculated as the mass (m), multiplied by the speed of light (c) squared.
The name of Einstein's paper was "Does the inertia of a body depend on its energy content?" It was published on November 21, 1905. This was one of his Annus Mirabilis (Miracle Year) papers. He was the first to propose that the equivalence between mass and energy is a consequence and principle of spacetime's symmetries.
Einstein was the first to directly deduce that mass and energy were equivalent by this formula. However, he was not the first to relate mass with energy. It was thought at one point that the only energy that contributes to mass comes from electromagnetic fields. Once Einstein's equivalence was discovered, it was written in many different notations. It's justification and interpretation was further developed in several steps.
Isaac Newton
In 1717, Isaac Newton had a speculation that light particles and matter particles were interconvertible.
It was Query 30, in his Opticks, where he asks: "Are not the gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter their composition?"
Edmond Swedenborg
Edmond Swedenborg, in 1734, in his Principia, proposed that all matter is composed of dimensionless points. These were points of pure and total motion. This motion was without force, direction or speed. However, they had the potential for force, direction and speed everywhere within it.
In the 19th century, there were various ether theories that contained some speculative attempts to show that energy and mass were convertible.
Nikolay Umov
Olinto De Pretto
In 1873, Nikolay Umov proposed a relationship between mass for ether in the form of Е = kmc2, where 0.5 ≤ k ≤ 1.
Samuel Tolver Preston , and then a 1903 paper by Olinto De Pretto, also presented a mass-energy relation. It was observed in 1999 that there were only 3 degrees of separation between De Pretto and Einstein. This led to a general conclusion that Einstein was aware of De Pretto's work.
Preston and De Pretto imagined that the universe was filled with an ether of tiny particles that move at speed c. These particles would have a kinetic energy of mc2 , up to a small numerical factor.
Gustave Le Bon, in 1905, independent of the work of Einstein will propose that atoms could release large amounts of latent energy.
Einstein considered energy and mass to be two names for the same underlying, conserved physical quantity. Einstein believed the laws of conservation of energy and of conservation of mass were one and the same.
Einstein said in 1946,"the principle of the conservation of mass [...] proved inadequate in the face of the special theory of relativity. It was therefore merged with the energy conservation principle—just as, about 60 years before, the principle of the conservation of mechanical energy had been combined with the principle of the conservation of heat [thermal energy]. We might say that the principle of the conservation of energy, having previously swallowed up that of the conservation of heat, now proceeded to swallow that of the conservation of mass—and holds the field alone."
In Einstein's 1905 paper, during his Annus Mirabilis, "Does the Inertia of an object Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", he does not explicitly state the formula E = mc2 . However, rather, the paper states that if a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c2
Radiation here, means electromagnetic radiation, or light, and mass means the ordinary Newtonian mass of a slow-moving object.
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