The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements

- Season 1

(2015)

One of science's great odd couples--British minister Joseph Priestley and French tax administrator Antoine Lavoisier--together discover a fantastic new gas called oxygen, overturning the reigning theory of chemistry and triggering a worldwide search for new elements. Soon caught up in the hunt is science's first great showman, a precocious British chemist named Humphry Davy, who dazzles London audiences with his lectures, introduces them to laughing gas, and turns the battery into a powerful tool in the search for new elements.

Over a single weekend in 1869, a young Russian chemistry professor named Dmitri Mendeleev invents the Periodic Table, bringing order to the growing gaggle of elements. But this sense of order is shattered when a Polish graduate student named Marie Sklodowska Curie discovers radioactivity, revealing that elements can change identities - and that atoms must have undiscovered parts inside them.

Caught up in the race to discover the atom's internal parts - and learn how they fit together - a young British physicist, Harry Moseley, uses newly discovered X-rays to put the Periodic Table in a whole new light. And a young American chemist named Glenn Seaborg creates a new element - plutonium - that changes the world forever, unleashing a force of unimaginable destructive power: the atomic bomb