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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