Thirteen building blocks in a science that may be the foundation of the modern world: Joseph Priestly and Antoine Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen, John Dalton's atomic theory, Avogadro's Law, Friedrich Woehler's synthesis of urea, Friedrich Kekule's studies of molecular structure, Dmitry Mendeleyev's Periodic Table, Humphry Davy's electrolysis, J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron, Niels Bohr's model of atomic structure, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunson's electromagnetic spectroscopy, Marie Curie's isolation of radioactive materials, John Wesley Hyatt and Leo Baekeland's invention of plastics, and the discovery of fullerenes.

• Bill Nye