Original subtitles

MICHAEL EMERSON: One night in 1669, a German alchemist named Hennig Brandt

was searching, as he did every night, for a way to make gold.

For some time, Brandt had focused his research on urine.

He was certain the "golden stream" held the key.

Tonight, his patience would at last be rewarded.

He had boiled the urine down to a concentrated paste.

Now he subjected it to intense heat.

Was this the legendary elixir that would turn lead into gold?

Alas, it was not.

Brandt had stumbled on the element phosphorus.

This is how the discovery of elements began:

with people trying to turn the substances of nature

into something useful or valuable.

But people are naturally curious,

so as they worked with these materials,

they began to wonder, "What is this stuff?

What is the world made of?"

Thousands of years ago, the Greeks proposed that the world

is actually made of just four elements in combination:

air, water, earth and fire.

Today, we know that matter

actually comes in more than a hundred distinct varieties,

neatly arranged in the periodic table of the elements.

But for most of history, matter was a profound mystery,

a 2,000-year detective story in which people across the world

were trying to identify the elements

and figure out how to use them.

It's an amazing story, filled with unforgettable characters.

In this series, you'll meet seven extraordinary scientists

whose findings drove the search for the elements.

So join me as we retrace the steps

of these chemical detectives

as they struggle to solve the mystery of matter.

(shouting and laughing)

¶ ¶

Major funding

for The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements

was provided by...

The National Science Foundation,

where discoveries begin.

Additional funding provided by...

The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations,

dedicated to strengthening America's future

through education.

And by the following:

One of the first big clues in solving the mystery of matter

came from the discovery

of the most immaterial stuff you can imagine: air.

Of course, people have always known about air.

They could feel the wind on their faces

and see its powerful effects in storms.

What they didn't know

was that there's more than one kind of air.

That changed in 1754,

when a young Scottish medical student named Joseph Black

set out to find a cure for kidney stones.

He poured acid on this chalky substance...

...and trapped the air that came out.

To his surprise, this "air" didn't behave like air at all.

It was heavier than ordinary air and promptly put out a flame.

Black's discovery of fixed air--

what we now call carbon dioxide--

was a turning point in the history of science.

People had long known about liquids and solids.

Now suddenly, they realized

there was a third state of matter-- gases--

of which air is just one example.

Over the next 20 years,

the exploration of this new dimension

would transform our understanding of matter.

After Black's discovery,

British scientists quickly identified two more new gases:

hydrogen and nitrogen.

And then in the early 1770s,

that astonishing investigator Joseph Priestley

discovers all sorts of new airs.

EMERSON: Priestley was a minister by trade,

but also an amateur scientist--

what was then called a natural philosopher.

He was a great dabbler in things

and was constantly getting obsessed with new fields.

EMERSON: Fields like the new science of gases.

MAUSKOPF: Priestley's style of science is very interesting.

He's a kind of inspired forager.

He's basically messing around with different things

to see what will happen.

One of the things Priestley did was to pour acid on everything.

He collected those bubbles, tested them thoroughly

and discovered all sorts of amazing properties.

EMERSON: By "messing around" in this way,

Priestley discovered nine new gases--

more than anyone else in the world.

JOHNSON: He was very much open to chance discoveries.

He would stumble across things

and he would follow his instincts.

And he was always looking

for these kind of fortuitous accidents.

EMERSON: One such accident happened in 1767,

when Priestley was assigned a new congregation.

JOHNSON: They put him in a house

that happens to be right next to a brewery.

And this turns out to be an incredible stroke of good luck.

Priestley, being the constant investigator that he was,

would kind of pop over

and see what was going on at this brewery.

EMERSON: Just above the vats of beer,

he discovered a haze of carbon dioxide

bubbling up from the fermenting brew.

And he decided he wanted to do some experiments

with their beer.

Well, fortunately, they said yes.

Priestley found that if he simply poured water

from one glass to another over the surface,

the water would absorb the gas rising from the beer.

The result was refreshingly bubbly.

By 1772, he had invented a better method:

generating carbon dioxide

and injecting it directly into water.

PRIESTLEY (dramatized): In the space of two or three minutes,

I can make a glass

of exceedingly pleasant sparkling water.

You can't tell the difference between this

and natural mineral water.

Priestley had invented carbonation.

Remember that the next time you enjoy a soft drink.

But with this act, he also set in motion

a series of improbable events

that would soon overturn our understanding of matter.

It began when a British doctor

suggested Priestley's "windy water"

might be effective as a treatment for scurvy,

a disease that plagued sailors on long sea voyages.

JOHNSON: Scurvy was a huge problem for the military during that period,

and so the idea that there was this potential solution

that also happened to be a tasty beverage was appealing.

EMERSON: In 1772, Priestley addressed

Britain's leading scientific organization, the Royal Society,

and published a pamphlet

describing his method for making soda water.

He urged the British navy to test the potential cure.

Quick to pick up on this development

was a defrocked Portuguese monk named João Jacinto de Magellan.

A distant relative of the great Portuguese navigator,

he was now serving as a French industrial spy.

Magellan is in the employ of the French government

and is there basically scouting out the Royal Society

for interesting items

that he might be able to bring back to his bosses.

EMERSON: Sensing a potential military secret,

Magellan alerted his handler back in France:

Commerce Minister Jean Charles Trudaine de Montigny.

MAUSKOPF: Trudaine was interested in science,

was a member of the French Royal Academy of Sciences,

and immediately saw the possible value of this.

EMERSON: Trudaine, in turn, called on one of France's

brightest young chemists, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier.

(men speaking French)

TRUDAINE: "I know your precision when it comes to physics and chemistry,

"and I'm giving you a chance to be of service to your country.

"Please repeat these experiments and add your own observations.

The value of these discoveries depends on our moving quickly."

I hope you will not be long in getting this little work done.

Trudaine probably intended this politely phrased letter

as an order rather than a request.

Lavoisier really couldn't ignore it.

EMERSON: Though soda water would turn out to be useless against scurvy,

this pointed suggestion by a government official,

acting on a tip from a Portuguese spy,

would set Lavoisier on the path toward his greatest discoveries.

Born into a well-to-do Parisian family,

Lavoisier had received a fine education

and taken a degree in law.

Now 28, he had joined a consortium

that collected taxes for King Louis XV.

MAUSKOPF: As a result, Lavoisier became a very wealthy man.

EMERSON: But his true passion was chemistry.

Lavoisier spent three hours in his private laboratory

before work every day and returned there after dinner,

often accompanied by his young wife.

Marie-Anne Paulze was the daughter

of one of Lavoisier's business partners.

(speaking French)

EMERSON: She was just 13 when they were married,

but bright, outgoing and mature beyond her years.

MAUSKOPF: Marie-Anne was virtually his collaborator.

She knew English, learned chemistry,

assisted Lavoisier in the laboratory.

She was an extraordinary person.

Had she lived in our own time, she probably would have become

an outstanding scientist in her own right.

EMERSON: One of Marie-Anne's most important roles

was to create the diagrams and illustrations

that accompanied her husband's published work.

ROCKE: Marie Lavoisier's drawings give us the eyes

to look directly into Lavoisier's laboratory.

We can see the people.

We can see the devices.

We can see the arrangement of those devices.

We can understand what Lavoisier did

so much better because of what Marie drew.

EMERSON: Spurred on by Trudaine,

Lavoisier eagerly studied fresh translations

of Black, Priestley and the other British chemists

who had pioneered the study of "airs."

LAVOISIER (dramatized): The work of these previous experimenters

merely hints at what's happening

when air is taken up or released by different substances.

I shall review all their work,

repeat all their experiments, taking new precautions,

in order to develop a coherent theory.

This subject, I believe, is destined to bring about

a revolution in physics and chemistry.

EMERSON: What made this new science of air so revolutionary

was that it threatened to topple

the reigning theory of chemistry,

a theory inspired by the mystery of fire.

Most chemists believed fire was due to some fiery principle

that was given up during combustion.

And all our senses seem to confirm this idea.

Heat, light, smoke-- all are released as the fire burns.

By the mid-1700s,

this essence of fire had been given a name: phlogiston.

Phlogiston was the foundation of chemistry's leading theory

for nearly a century,

because it seemed to explain things like metals and rust.

When iron ore was heated in the presence of charcoal,

phlogiston from the charcoal fused with the ore

to form metallic iron.

When the iron was exposed to air or water,

the metal released its phlogiston as it rusted.

Other metals went through the same process,

forming the green verdigris of copper, for example.

Ore plus phlogiston equals metal.

Metal minus phlogiston equals rust,

or what was then called a "calx."

ROCKE: Only there was a problem:

the calx was heavier than the metal,

even though phlogiston had left the metal.

It's lost something, and yet it was heavier.

The calx should weigh less than the original metal,

but it doesn't.

The calx is heavier than the metal.

ROCKE: Though many chemists were aware of this contradiction,

they let it pass

because phlogiston otherwise worked so well.

But Lavoisier was really troubled by this

because he was obsessed with the weights

of his experimental ingredients.

GREGORY PETSKO: Lavoisier was very careful to get very good instruments.

He probably at one point had the largest

and most complete private laboratory on earth.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: With my precision scales,

imported from England at great expense,

I measure the weight of each substance

at the beginning and end of every chemical reaction.

ROCKE: Lavoisier was a master of this balance sheet kind of chemistry.

Remember, he was a tax administrator by day.

He knew a lot about accounting.

And so this kind of ledger-keeping

was natural to him.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: It is a fundamental truth of chemistry

that the same amount of matter exists

before and after each experiment.

Nothing new is created, nothing lost.

The whole art of performing chemical experiments

rests on this principle.

EMERSON: Today, we call this idea the conservation of matter.

MAUSKOPF: When you carry out a chemical reaction,

what comes out has to be exactly equal to what goes in.

The total weight must remain precisely the same.

If not, there's an error somewhere.

ROCKE: He wasn't the first to assume conservation of matter,

but Lavoisier applied this idea more rigorously

than anyone had before.

And it worked very effectively as a tool: a tool of discovery.

EMERSON: The power of Lavoisier's method would become clear

in October 1772, when he set out to solve the riddle

of why metals gain weight when they form calxes.

Common sense suggested that when things rust,

they must lose weight.

They fall apart.

They become brittle and weak.

Lavoisier was interested

in actually measuring what happened.

EMERSON: He conducted his experiments in public,

relying on a huge burning lens

that focused the sun's rays to produce intense heat,

while elegantly dressed bystanders watched in amazement.

Lavoisier placed a calx of lead, mixed with charcoal,

inside a glass vessel partially filled with water,

then subjected it to the intense heat of the burning lens.

The result was extraordinary.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: As the calx changes back into the metal,

it releases a large quantity of air.

This air forms a volume 1,000 times greater

than the calx it came from.

EMERSON: This startling finding suggested

a radical idea.

If air came out as the calx changed back into a metal,

could it have gone in when the calx was formed?

Could air be the reason calxes were heavier than expected?

Lavoisier also found that when he burned elements like sulfur,

they, too, gained weight.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: There was then no doubt.

I realized that the increase in weight occurs

because a portion of the air is absorbed

into the solid material.

He knew he was onto something very important.

He knew that the element

did not lose mass; it gained mass.

It took up some part of the air.

I felt I must secure my right to this important discovery.

So I deposited a note with le Secretaire de l'Academy

to remain sealed

until I was ready to make my experiments public.

He's discovered what seems to be evidence

by weighing things that seem to flatly contradict

what the phlogiston theory is predicting.

EMERSON: Despite what our senses tell us, both rusting and burning

involve absorbing something from the air--

just the opposite

of what chemistry's reigning theory held.

ROCKE: It had been known for 100 years

that metals gain weight when they become calxes,

but no one had bothered to really investigate this anomaly.

By focusing so intently on weight,

Lavoisier had challenged the very foundation of chemistry.

And he'd identified the source of that weight gain.

Air was somehow involved.

EMERSON: But was it air itself, or some part of the air?

And if so, what part?

The identity of the mystery gas eluded him for two years.

(frustrated shout)

EMERSON: He was still stumped in late 1774.

But the answer would soon be delivered

by Joseph Priestley.

By this time, Priestley had begun to study something

called the red calx of mercury.

Mercury is a strange metal,

one of just two elements that is liquid at room temperature.

But like other metals, it forms a calx,

a red solid that pharmacists of the 1700s used

to treat venereal disease.

Chemists had noticed something unusual about this calx.

They could convert it back into metallic mercury

simply by heating it.

No charcoal-- no source of phlogiston--

was needed.

This was theoretically impossible.

How could it be?

The ever-curious Priestley wanted to know,

so in August 1774, he obtained a sample of mercury calx

and used his own burning lens to heat it with sunlight.

HOFFMANN: That reddish substance in turn decomposes,

giving back mercury, but also a gas.

MAUSKOPF: Priestley collects this air

because he likes to test these gases

to see what properties they have.

EMERSON: If it were his old friend "fixed air,"

the candle would go out.

MAUSKOPF: But what he found about this air

was that it had quite extraordinary properties.

What astounded me was that the candle burned in this air

with remarkable vigor.

The flame was bigger and brighter than in ordinary air.

JOHNSON: Something in this air seems almost better than normal air,

which is very puzzling.

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY: I was utterly at a loss.

How could I explain this?

(speaking French)

Dr. Priestley, have you been to the Continent before?

No, this is my first time.

EMERSON: Two months later, on a visit to Paris,

Priestley was invited to dine with members

of the Royal Academy of Sciences,

including Antoine Lavoisier.

J'ai récemment réalisé...

MAUSKOPF: Priestley tells Lavoisier in his very broken French

about his new discovery.

...avec les résultats tres intéressants.

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY: I described this experiment

at the table of Monsieur Lavoisier.

I never make the least secret of anything I do.

...la meme aire de plombe rouge.

JOHNSON: Everything that he came up with,

every new experiment that he did,

even when he wasn't sure what the results meant...

Qu'est-ce que c'est ce plombe rouge?

...he was constantly sharing that information

with as many people as possible.

Mais à ma grande surprise...

PRIESTLEY: I also told them that it produced a kind of air

in which a candle burned much better than in common air.

...mieux que dans l'air commun.

(talking excitedly)

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY: At this, the entire company,

including Monsieur and Madame Lavoisier,

expressed great surprise.

I'm sure they cannot have forgotten these events.

Monsieur Priestley,

etes-vous bien sûr que ce n'était pas l'air fixe?

If you want, I can translate for you.

Merci.

Are you sure that what you found was not fixed air?

Absolutely.

But I'm not yet sure of what it was.

MAUSKOPF: Lavoisier did not appreciate Priestley's style.

He didn't think Priestley brought very much thought

to his scientific foraging.

STEVEN JOHNSON: But Lavoisier was smart enough

to recognize that Priestley was onto something

and take that piece of information

and go back to his lab

to figure out exactly what Priestley had discovered.

EMERSON: Could this be the gas he was looking for,

the one involved in rusting and burning?

Lavoisier hurried to the local apothecary

to buy his own sample of mercury calx.

Back in England,

Priestley dithered for months on other projects,

unaware he was in danger of being scooped.

Finally, it occurred to him:

if this gas he had discovered supports fire,

might it also support breathing?

JOHNSON: Here we have one of the great discoveries

in the history of chemistry,

and the scene is kind of amazing.

You've got this man and a mouse.

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY: I put a mouse into a glass vessel

containing two ounces of the air from the heated calx of mercury.

If it were common air, a full-grown mouse

would have survived in it perhaps a quarter of an hour.

(clock ticking)

JOHNSON: 15 minutes pass...

20 minutes pass...

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY: In this air, my mouse remained

perfectly at ease for a full half-hour.

JOHNSON: That's twice as long as any mouse has ever survived.

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY: I began to suspect that the air into which I had put the mouse

was better than common air.

JOHNSON: He takes the same mouse,

sticks it back under the glass,

and sure enough, the mouse survives

another 30 minutes in this strange new air.

He realizes that something fundamentally different

has happened.

This air is some kind of super air.

I concluded that this air

was between five and six times better--

that is, more breathable--

than the best common air I'd ever tested.

JOHNSON: He finally has kind of convinced himself

this air must be safe to breathe if the mouse is doing so well,

and so he gets up enough courage to actually try it himself.

(inhales)

(exhales)

It doesn't feel any different from common air

when I breathe it in.

But I feel peculiarly light and easy.

In time, this pure air may be useful as a medicine

or sold to the fashionable for recreation.

Up to now, only two mice and I

have had the privilege of breathing it.

JOHNSON: As Priestley is conducting these experiments in England,

across the channel, Lavoisier is basically going through

the exact same experiments.

HOFFMANN: Lavoisier, realizing that this is essentially

the key to the mystery, gets to work on it.

(both laughing excitedly)

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: I found, much to my surprise,

that this air had none of the properties of "fixed air."

A candle burned in it with a dazzling splendor,

and charcoal, instead of just smoldering,

threw sparks in every direction.

(laughing)

EMERSON: Lavoisier announced his findings with great fanfare

at the 1775 Easter meeting of the Academy of Sciences.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: All this evidence convinced me that this air

is more...

more breathable, more combustible,

and more pure than even the common air in which we live.

And he gives it the name "oxygen."

EMERSON: In announcing his findings, Lavoisier made no mention

of Priestley's revelation over dinner six months earlier.

HOFFMANN: Now, Priestley is not a shrinking violet here.

He hears about this and he objects.

He should have acknowledged

that my account over dinner led him to try the experiment.

One should not put one's scythe into another man's harvest.

I admit I was not the first to do these experiments.

That claim goes to Mr. Priestley.

But from the results,

we have drawn diametrically opposite conclusions.

I may be criticized for having borrowed from the work

of this celebrated philosopher,

but I trust that the originality of my conclusions

will not be challenged.

EMERSON: Lavoisier was right.

While it was Priestley who made the discovery,

it was Lavoisier

who grasped the implications of this new gas.

HOFFMANN: Lavoisier was the only one

who understood what was going on.

Perhaps he didn't understand perfectly,

but the moment that new element,

which we call oxygen, was there,

he picks it up and he runs with it.

EMERSON: Over the next 15 years,

Lavoisier would show that air is not a simple substance,

as the ancients believed,

but a mixture of two newly discovered gases.

That water, too, was a product of two gases.

And that fire is not an element,

but a process of combining with oxygen.

Even the solid substances

the ancients had lumped under the heading "earth"

were now seen in a new way.

ROCKE: Metals like iron and tin and lead

had been known for centuries.

But in the era of phlogiston,

they were thought to be compounds

because they had phlogiston in them.

Lavoisier had turned this picture upside down.

He showed that by stripping away the oxygen from the ore,

you got down to the simpler metal within.

The metal, not the ore, was the element.

EMERSON: So all four of the ancient elements--

air, water, earth and fire--

had been abolished, thanks to the discovery of oxygen.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Once you accept the existence of oxygen,

the main difficulties of chemistry appear to evaporate.

Well, if all of chemistry can be explained without phlogiston,

in all likelihood, it doesn't exist.

EMERSON: For years, many chemists, including Joseph Priestley,

refused to abandon the old theory.

What finally won the day

was the textbook Lavoisier wrote in 1789

to spread his new chemical theory.

As it was adopted around the world,

phlogiston quietly passed into history.

So the old chemical system has been essentially destroyed.

EMERSON: Though Lavoisier is often given most of the credit,

it was really both these men,

working in their very different ways,

who brought about this chemical revolution.

JOHNSON: They kind of needed each other in a way.

For science to work, you need both kinds of scientists, right?

You need the scientists who are great systematizers,

and then you need the mavericks and the tinkerers

who are going to open up new doors for discovery.

EMERSON: One of the doors Priestley and Lavoisier opened

was a fresh way to tackle that old question:

what is the world made of?

It was clear now that rocks of every conceivable variety

might harbor undiscovered elements

chemically fused with oxygen.

PETSKO: People realized

that if they could release oxygen from other substances,

what was left behind might be some of these missing elements

that everybody knew must be out there.

How many more elements might you find

by stripping away the oxygen

that liked to bind to so many things?

EMERSON: Lavoisier's textbook

included the first modern list of elements:

33 "simple substances."

Some, including light and heat,

were later found not to be elements.

But it was a start,

and it served as a challenge to other chemists.

Now that they knew how to look for them,

chemists began to ask, "What are the elements?"

The question had never been asked before

in exactly that way.

And so the discovery of oxygen really served as a starting gun

for a worldwide race for new elements.

All over the world, chemists and amateur collectors

responded to Lavoisier's challenge,

rapidly identifying 15 new elements.

From Sweden to Mexico, Connecticut to Siberia,

the discoveries kept coming,

sometimes as many as four in a single year.

And few things could bring a chemist more glory

than identifying a new element.

Well, certainly, Lavoisier was one of the great, great masters

of all time.

In fact...

EMERSON: One of those who would soon be caught up in the hunt

was a precocious chemist from the farthest reaches of England.

...pathetic ideas of phlogiston, huh?

I've just met a remarkable young man

whose talents I can only marvel at.

He's not even 21

and has been studying chemistry for no more than 18 months,

but he's advanced with such strides

as to overtake everybody.

His name is Davy, the young chemist.

The young everything.

EMERSON: Humphry Davy was the son of a simple wood carver

from the remote seaside village of Penzance,

about a week from London by stagecoach.

DAVID KNIGHT: Penzance is right down in the far southwest corner of England,

and in some sense, it was the Wild West,

right out beyond the influence of London and its institutions.

EMERSON: When his father died young, Humphry left school at 16

and took a job as an apothecary's apprentice

to support the family.

But he never lost his love of learning.

He simply resolved to teach himself.

The same year that Davy's father dies,

Lavoisier publishes

his Elementary Treatise on Chemistry.

And young Davy reads this in the original French.

He starts keeping notebooks from this very date.

And there's a kind of intellectual explosion.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Chemistry arose from the delusions of alchemy,

only to be bound by the chains of phlogiston.

But through the discoveries of Black, Priestley and Lavoisier,

it has now been liberated!

KNIGHT: Davy started doing experiments right away.

One of the things he did

was to attack Lavoisier's theory of heat.

Lavoisier said it was a material substance called calorique.

And Davy didn't believe this.

Davy thought he could take on the great man.

He thought heat was motion of particles.

And he thought he could prove this

if he could rub two pieces of ice together--

so no heat would be coming in from outside--

and the sheer friction would melt the blocks of ice.

And that's what happened.

To him and his contemporaries,

the experiment was a convincing one.

EMERSON: Davy's findings, written up in his first published work,

showed enough promise to land him a post

closer to Britain's center of action,

in Bristol, at the Pneumatic Institution.

HOLMES: So he leaves remote Penzance

to become the assistant and then the director

of this new institute.

He's only 19, for heaven's sake.

EMERSON: The institution had been founded in the hope

that some of the gases

discovered by Priestley and others

would prove useful in treating diseases.

Davy's job was to make the gases and then test them.

I took just three breaths of the gas.

The first produced a feeling of numbness.

EMERSON: One of the gases he tested was mostly carbon monoxide,

the poisonous gas now found in auto exhaust.

HOLMES: He doesn't know exactly what it is, but he makes it.

And he tests everything on himself.

It's amazingly reckless, but it's also very brave.

JOSEPH COTTLE: He acted as if in sacrificing one life,

he had two or three others in reserve.

Some days, I half despaired

of seeing him alive the next morning.

HOLMES: And then he takes his pulse and he says,

"I do not think I shall die."

And he's ill for 48 hours, but he survives.

On a number of occasions, he does nearly kill himself.

When you've got a career to make

and you're coming from a low point down the social scale

and you've got a long way to go,

why not take a few risks, get your way up to the top quicker?

EMERSON: The top Davy had in mind was the very pinnacle of science.

On one page of his Bristol notebooks, he wrote his own name

next to that of the most famous British scientist of all time.

Newton and Davy.

So he has this sense that he and Newton

can go at science together.

It's not arrogance exactly.

It's this tremendous drive,

and he passionately believes that he will be

a sort of Newton in chemistry.

I don't hesitate at all.

The great master made a few mistakes.

HOLMES: All his life, that drive is there: Newton and Davy.

EMERSON: In Bristol, Davy sought out a group of literary men

whose work would define the Romantic Age,

including publisher Joseph Cottle

and poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

...the assumption that heat is a simple substance.

Is that what he called caloric?

Precisely.

HOLMES: In looking at that group in Bristol,

one of the things I think is wonderful

is there was no gap

between the writers and the poets and the scientists.

We can discover that the ice melts by friction alone.

Davy, could not the melting have been caused

by the temperature of the room?

That's a very good question, indeed--

one to which I have a ready answer.

HOLMES: Every evening, they're going out,

writing letters to each other, going on walks together.

And they are young men with a future.

It's an extraordinary group.

EMERSON: In Davy, these Romantic poets found a kindred spirit:

a scientist who shared their sense of wonder at nature

and yearned to reveal her mysterious ways.

Heat must, in fact, be the motion of particles.

There's an energy, an elasticity in his mind

that allows him to seize on and analyze all subjects.

Living thoughts spring up like turf under his feet.

EMERSON: Early in his research,

Davy produced a gas one medical authority had warned

was the cause of terrible diseases.

He tried it anyway.

HUMPHRY DAVY: This evening,

I breathed nitrous oxide

and experienced a... thrilling all over me

more pleasurable than anything I have ever experienced.

The objects around me became dazzling

and my hearing more acute.

Sometimes I responded by stamping my feet.

(stomping)

Other times by dancing around the room

and laughing uncontrollably.

(laughing)

EMERSON: As word of his discovery spread, many others,

from steam engine pioneer James Watt

to the king's own doctor,

clamored to try Davy's "laughing gas."

KNIGHT: Coleridge and Southey both took doses of the gas.

It was very much in keeping with this Romantic time period.

ROBERT SOUTHEY: He's invented a whole new pleasure.

It makes you laugh and tingle in every toe and fingertip.

KNIGHT: There was a certain amount of recklessness,

experimenting with drugs.

Why not expand your consciousness?

ROBERT SOUTHEY: It makes you strong and happy!

So gloriously happy!

(laughing)

Oh, excellent airbag.

(laughing continues)

I'm going for more this evening.

EMERSON: Davy asked each of his subjects to record their impressions.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: The first time I tried nitrous oxide,

I felt a highly pleasurable sensation of warmth

over my whole body.

It was like the feeling I once experienced

entering a warm room

after returning from a walk in the snow.

I felt no desire to move,

only to laugh at those who were looking at me.

(laughing)

EMERSON: Davy wrote up their accounts in his first true scientific book.

But just as he was finishing the book,

Davy's attention was diverted by a discovery

that would shake the very foundations of science.

In 1800, an Italian named Alessandro Volta

announced that he had created a new source of electricity.

Up to then, the only sources of electricity had been lightning,

which was very difficult to tap,

and electrostatic devices like the ones Priestley had used.

KNIGHT: You could get quite spectacular effects

in the way of flashes and bangs,

but you couldn't get sustained power.

What Volta did was to establish that electricity

was something that you could make a steady supply of:

what we call an electric current.

Volta's device was incredibly simple:

a sandwich of alternating copper and zinc disks,

separated by pieces of cardboard

that had been soaked in salt water.

But this "voltaic pile," the first battery,

electrified the world of science.

With the battery, you could now perform a variety of experiments

that had never been possible before.

And these experiments were done immediately.

Just weeks after learning of Volta's discovery,

two British scientists used a crude battery like this one

to split water into its two elements:

hydrogen and oxygen.

KNIGHT: The electric current was somehow

breaking up the water into its components.

Even more surprising,

the hydrogen collected at the negative electrode over here...

And the oxygen collected at the positive electrode over here.

Why would these two elements show a preference

for opposite electrical charges?

EMERSON: Intrigued, Davy set aside his research on gases,

built a voltaic pile

and began doing his own experiments on electricity.

KNIGHT: And it became Davy's big pursuit in life.

What could this electric current do?

HUMPHRY DAVY: Volta has given us a key

to some of the most mysterious recesses of nature.

Till this discovery, our tools were limited.

Now the possibilities for chemistry seem boundless.

It's like an undiscovered country-- a land of promise.

EMERSON: Davy had just begun to explore that land

when opportunity knocked.

His book on nitrous oxide had caught the attention

of the founders of the new Royal Institution in London,

who were looking for a director for their chemistry laboratory.

And that book had such impact that it was read in London,

here at the Royal Institution.

It's very, very precise.

It's measured.

It's quantitative science.

And they thought, "This is the man we must get."

EMERSON: Still only 22, Davy set out on his next great adventure,

leaving Bristol in 1801 for the city he called

"the great hot-bed of human power."

KNIGHT: When Davy arrived,

his patrons seem to have been a bit taken aback

to find this still rather raw country youth.

But his natural eloquence must have come through

and eventually charmed them.

EMERSON: One of the missions of the institution

was to offer public lectures meant to stimulate

an interest in science among the London elite.

For this purpose, a theater had been installed

in the institution's building on Albemarle Street.

Davy started out as assistant lecturer,

seen here helping his boss give a dose of laughing gas

to one of the patrons.

But with audiences shrinking

and the institution's fortunes flagging,

Davy was quickly promoted to the top job.

Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind...

EMERSON: Determined to make the most of this opportunity,

he set out to make each lecture seem spontaneous.

But to do spontaneous,

what he did was prepare, prepare.

...as to suppose that there are no new mysteries left in nature.

HOLMES: He would read through, in front of his assistants,

drafts of the lecture to see if it worked.

DAVY: Who would not want to learn

the most profound secrets of nature?

To ascertain her hidden operations?

The moment Davy began to lecture,

the audiences packed in.

DAVY: Science has done much for man,

but it is capable of doing still more.

He had people absolutely lapping up what he was pouring out.

EMERSON: There were other chemists

giving public talks elsewhere in London,

but none held a candle to Davy.

He must have directed his bright eyes around his audience

so that they felt really drawn in and mesmerized.

And he would do dazzling experiments

that he carefully rehearsed with his assistants the night before,

so they always worked.

HOLMES: And people gasp, and they cheer and they clap

at the end of a demonstration.

It's so brilliantly done.

And these lectures became hugely popular,

and there were the most terrible traffic jams

outside the Royal Institution.

Albemarle Street became the first one-way street in London

because there were so many carriages

bringing people to listen to his lectures.

He was young, he was handsome,

he was eloquent.

And there were a number of young ladies in the audience.

HOLMES: And they're all in the front rows making notes,

but hanging on Davy's every word.

Among the lecture notes in the Royal Institution archive

are these little billets-doux, little love letters,

often signed with a pseudonym, and poems to him.

EMERSON: One of his female admirers invited him to dinner, noting,

"Those eyes are too fine to be forever gazing over crucibles."

I have audiences of 400 or 500 people,

many of high rank, and I suspect that some of them

may become permanently interested in chemistry.

This science is becoming the fashion of the day.

EMERSON: Davy's success as a lecturer and entertainer

brought him wealth, prizes and acclaim.

But he was growing impatient.

Giving popular lectures

was no way to become the Newton of chemistry.

By 1806, he had established enough of a reputation,

and he knew that his work

was supporting the Royal Institution.

He could say, "Right, I've been doing your work

"for the last five or six years.

Now I'm going to do my own work."

EMERSON: An invitation from an organization

once headed by Newton himself

gave Davy the perfect chance to show what he could do.

HOLMES: He was asked to lecture not to the Royal Institution

but to the Royal Society,

the top scientific group in the world.

He needed to produce some dramatically original science.

EMERSON: With this goal in mind, Davy dived into the subject

he'd been itching to return to ever since Bristol.

(thunder rumbling)

Electricity.

Up to now, we have studied electricity

only its most powerful form: lightning.

But its slow and silent operations

on the earth's surface may prove more important.

EMERSON: From his early experiments,

Davy had learned that an electric current

could pry apart the hydrogen and oxygen atoms

that made up water.

You can use a battery to un-bond things

and find out what the different elements are.

EMERSON: That gave Davy an idea.

Could he use a bigger battery

to tackle substances that were harder to break down?

ROCKE: This is something you can do

with this new source of electricity.

If a small battery gives you a small effect,

build a larger one and you get a larger effect.

EMERSON: As the target for his experiment,

Davy chose caustic potash,

a substance derived from wood ashes collected in a pot.

Chemists had long suspected

it contained an undiscovered element,

but no one had been able to break it down

into simpler stuff.

He believed

that if you could apply a charge to it in some way,

you would discover something about its inner nature.

So Davy constructed a really big battery

because he wanted to see

whether potash could be decomposed into its elements.

Davy was thus able

to use the resources of the Royal Institution

to undertake scientific research,

which had never been the intention

of the founders of the RI.

EMERSON: But by the time he began the work,

his Royal Society lecture was only a month away.

Shall we?

HOLMES: He committed himself rather recklessly

because he didn't really have much time.

EMERSON: Would this new battery be strong enough

to reveal what potash was made of?

HOLMES: Working at top speed,

he tries various ways of applying the charge.

EMERSON: Davy first tried putting a current

through a mixture of potash and water.

All that did was split the water into hydrogen and oxygen...

Do you see anything?

No.

EMERSON: ...leaving the potash unaffected.

And then he tried with dried potash.

And again, nothing happened.

EMERSON: Finally, he moistened the dry potash just a bit

before applying the electricity.

Dry potash won't conduct electricity,

but when I added a little water

and applied a strong electrical current,

I soon observed a vivid action.

There was a violent effervescence

and small globules.

HOLMES: It sweats forth

these glowing, shining globules.

HUMPHRY DAVY: They have a metallic luster very much like mercury,

and some of them exploded and burnt with a bright flame.

I realized these globules

were the substance I had been searching for.

And this is a new element, in fact.

It's potassium, one of the crucial elements for life.

And he's discovered it.

There's a wonderful description made by his assistant,

who was actually Edmund Davy, a young cousin.

He said, "The Professor became a boy again."

When he saw those globules of potassium

burst through the crust of potash and catch fire,

he couldn't contain his joy.

(laughing)

It was some time before he could compose himself

and continue with the experiment.

HOLMES: You get the sense of this huge excitement,

doing things under pressure,

not quite knowing what will happen,

whether the damn thing will explode,

and then suddenly,

the unknown reveals itself.

KNIGHT: The atoms of potassium and oxygen,

so firmly glued together, could be separated

by an electric current

in the same way as those oxygen and hydrogen atoms in water.

EMERSON: The very next day, Davy used the same method

to pull apart caustic soda, or lye,

to reveal another new element: sodium.

These two new metals were so soft,

they could be cut with a knife,

and so eager to recombine with oxygen

that they gave Davy the perfect demonstration

for his next lecture.

Be ready for anything.

All right.

Whoa!

(laughing)

(audience gasping and cheering)

EMERSON: Davy had turned electricity into a powerful tool

in the search for new elements.

The year after discovering potassium and sodium,

he used his battery to isolate four more elements.

And chemists all over Europe seized on his technique,

sending the number of elements even higher.

Sometimes, the progress of science

is due less to our intellectual powers

than to the tools at our disposal.

Nothing promotes the advancement of knowledge so much

as a new instrument.

EMERSON: Exciting as these discoveries were,

in time, it would become clear

that Davy's greatest contribution was his insight

into one of the biggest questions in chemistry.

KNIGHT: Somehow, the particles of matter have to be glued together

to form molecules.

And it was a complete mystery as to what this glue might be.

What Davy has had, in effect, is a big idea.

EMERSON: If electricity could pry apart the atoms

in water, potash and soda, might electricity be the force

that stuck those atoms together in the first place?

Is electricity an essential property of matter?

KNIGHT: Perhaps electricity, with its plus and minus aspects,

could be this kind of glue.

HUMPHRY DAVY: In every case that we know of,

substances that combine with each other

have opposite electrical states.

Perhaps this is the reason they're attracted to each other:

because opposites attract.

KNIGHT: It looked as if electricity might play in chemistry

the sort of role that gravity played in Newtonian physics.

Remember, he thinks of himself

as on a par in some way with Newton.

He is going to be the Newton among chemists.

And in a sense, he does eventually achieve that.

KNIGHT: In the 18th century, electricity was mostly parlor tricks,

like making somebody's hair stand on end

and attracting little bits of paper and so on.

Davy showed that electricity is a fundamental aspect of matter.

Electricity is what holds us together.

It is the glue that links the particles of matter.

And therefore, instead of being rather a side thing,

electricity is going to be

one of the really central features of science.

It would take more than a century

for other scientists to figure out electricity's role.

But after Davy, there was no doubt

it would be one of the keys

to solving the mystery of matter.

Next time on The Mystery of Matter...

MICHAEL GORDIN: He figures out something rather extraordinary

about the elements.

DMITRI MENDELEEV: The eye is immediately struck by a pattern:

a regular change in the horizontal rows

and the vertical columns.

ERIC SCERRI: He had discovered an absolutely fundamental principle of nature.

EVE CURIE: My mother made her measurements over again--

ten times, 20 times--

until she was forced to accept the results.

MARIE CURIE: I proposed a new term to define this property of matter:

radioactivity.

Major funding

for The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements

was provided by...

The National Science Foundation,

where discoveries begin.

Additional funding provided by...

The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations,

dedicated to strengthening America's future

through education.

And by the following:

for the elements and watch bonus

videos on the featured

scientists, visit pbs.org

/mysteryofmatter.

The Mystery of Matter:

Search for the Elements

is available on DVD. To order,

visit shopPBS.org or call

1-800-PLAY-PBS.

EMERSON: Joseph Priestley was the first to publish his discovery

of the remarkable gas we call oxygen.

Antoine Lavoisier was the first to understand

its true significance.

But there's a third man in the oxygen story:

a Swedish apothecary named Carl Wilhelm Scheele.

MAUSKOPF: Who's also, like Priestley, a wonderful experimentalist.

In fact, he made the discovery before Priestley did,

possibly as early as 1771.

EMERSON: But when he discovered the gas he called "fire air,"

Scheele decided to publish his results in a book

and waited years for his mentor to write the preface.

The book doesn't get published until 1777,

by which time all the chemists of Europe had already heard

about Priestley's and Lavoisier's work.

EMERSON: While Scheele's discovery of oxygen

had no impact on the course of science,

he did go on to have a hand

in the discovery of four more elements.

And got zero credit for this.

First of all, he was a pharmacist,

and nobody paid any attention to him.

Second, he was working in Sweden,

and most of the scientific world paid zero attention

to what was happening in Sweden.

And third, he had the misfortune to die rather young

as a result of his own experiments.

He was constantly sniffing terrible chemical substances

and was eventually found dead at his desk

with so many toxic materials around him that to this day,

nobody has any idea exactly what he died of.