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What is discovery? Why is it so important to be first? These are the questions that trouble the people in this play. "Oxygen" alternates between 1777 and 2001--the Centenary of the Nobel Prize--when the Nobel Foundation decides to inaugurate a "Retro-Nobel" Award for those great discoveries that preceded the establishment of the Nobel Prizes one hundred years before. The Foundation thinks this will be easy, that the Nobel Committee can reach back to a period when science was done for science's sake, when discovery was simple, pure, and unalloyed by controversy, priority claims, and hype....
The Chemistry Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decides to focus on the discovery of oxygen, since that event launched the modern chemical revolution. But who should be so honored? Lavoisier is a natural choice, for if there ever was a marker for the beginning of modem chemistry, it was Lavoisier's understanding of the true nature of combustion, rusting, and animal respiration, and the central role of oxygen in each of these processes, formulated in the period from 1770 to 1780. But what about Scheele? What about Priestley? Didn't they first discover oxygen?
Indeed, on an evening in October 1774, Antoine Lavoisier, the architect of the chemical revolution, learned that the Unitarian English minister, Joseph Priestley, had made a new gas. Within a week, a letter came to Lavoisier from the Swedish apothecary, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, instructing the French scientist how one might synthesize this key element in Lavoisier's developing theory, the lifegiver oxygen. Scheele's work was carried out years before, but remained unpublished until 1777.
Scheele and Priestley fit their discovery into an entirely wrong logical framework--the phlogiston theory--that Lavoisier is about to demolish. How does Lavoisier deal with the Priestley and Scheele discoveries? Does he give the discoverers their due credit? And what is discovery after all? Does it matter if you do not fully understand what you have found? Or if you do not let the world know?
In a fictional encounter in 1777, the play brings the three protagonists and their wives to Stockholm at the invitation of King Gustav III (of Un ballo in maschera fame). The question to be resolved: "Who discovered oxygen?" In the voices of the scientists' wives, in...