  The vast majority of physical objects we are dealing with are almost
exclusively made of atoms. Due to their discrete level structure, single atoms
have proved to be emitters of light which is incompatible with the classical
description of electromagnetic waves. We demonstrate this incompatibility for
atomic fluorescence when scaling up the size of the source ensemble, which
consists of trapped atomic ions, by several orders of magnitude. The presented
measurements of nonclassical statistics on light unconditionally emitted from
ensembles containing up to more than a thousand ions promise further
scalability to much larger emitter numbers. The methodology can be applied to a
broad range of experimental platforms focusing on the bare nonclassical
character of single isolated emitters.
