The Mystery of Matter is an exciting PBS series about one of the great adventures in the history of science: the long (and continuing) quest to understand what the world is made of--to identify, understand and organize the basic building blocks of matter.

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.