In the first of this five-part season we trace Katharine’s early years as she picks up European languages, her early scientific education at a progressive New York school for girls and then Bryn Mawr, a women’s college. She seems destined to end up working at the
General Electric Company’s industrial research lab, but first she must prove herself at the University of Chicago, where, in the middle of World War I, she works to improve the life-saving gas mask.