The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements

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.

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.

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.