Welcome to The Mystery of Matter Clip Collection – the entire PBS series in bite-size pieces.

The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements is a series of three one-hour documentaries, but it’s divided into six interconnected stories, each one less than 30 minutes long. So unlike most PBS documentaries, each of these stories is short enough to be watched in a single class period, with time leftover for discussion. We’ve created the Teacher’s Guide for teachers who want to use the series in that way.

But in our discussions with teachers, we’ve heard again and again that even shorter pieces are easier for them to fit into their schedules. With that in mind, we’ve broken the entire three-hour series up into 60 short clips, most of them 1-4 minutes long. So for teachers who want their students to watch just a short video about phlogiston ... or radioactivity ... or the discovery of the nucleus, to name just three examples, this offers a different way to use the series in the classroom.

Each of the six sections of the series focuses on one of our seven featured scientists (except Oxygen, which features two scientists: Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier). For each of those sections, we provide a one-page pdf summary of the section in about ten chapters. Teachers and students may instantly watch the clip that interests them simply by clicking on the chapter heading. To watch the next chapter, just return to the pdf by hitting the Back arrow on your browser and click on the next chapter heading.

To access the pdf summaries of the six sections of the series, click on the section titles in the Table of Contents below.

• Oxygen: The Gas that Changed Everything


• Humphry Davy: Chemistry’s First Showman


• Dmitri Mendeleev: Chemistry’s Improbable Savior


• Marie Curie: Unlikely Revolutionary


• Harry Moseley: Numbering the Elements


• Glenn Seaborg: Venturing Beyond Uranium