Episode Descriptions
Episode 1: Out of Thin Air (1754-1806)
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.
Episode 2: Unruly Elements (1859-1902)
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.
Episode 3: Into the Atom (1910-1960)
Caught up in the race to discover the
atom’s internal parts—and learn how they fit together—is a young British
physicist named Harry Moseley, who
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.
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