It has been more than two thousand years since we began to use an umbrella on rainy days. However, people often felt not convenient to hold an umbrella while working. Then the rubber raincoat was invented by an Englishman named Macintosh in 1823.

In 1492, Columbus, a well-known Italian voyager, _______ the New World—the American. He brought a lot of things to Europe from South America. Rubber was one of them, _______ people didn’t know its use at that time. In 1770, people found that the rubber could be used _______ erasers.

Macintosh was a worker in an eraser factory in Scotland. One day he spilled（洒出）some rubber liquid（液体）over his clothes _______ when making erasers. He was too busy to clean it and went back home wearing the _______ clothes. On the way home, it rained heavily. Having no umbrella, Macintosh had to run home quickly. When he got home, he _______ the wet clothes. To his surprise, the area of the _______ with rubber wasn’t wet. “Why not make a rubber raincoat?” Macintosh thought. The next day he brushed the rubber liquid all over a coat. He wore the “rubber coat” on _______ days and took a walk in the field to test if it _______ really keep off the rain. ________, the clothes inside the “rubber coat” weren’t wet at all. The rubber raincoat was created in this way by chance.

The rubber raincoats soon appeared on the market. However, they were sticky in summer and hardened in winter. Year after year, people kept on improving the raincoats. Today raincoats are widely used in our daily lives.

Let’s look at two old but popular inventions we use in our daily life.

The first Band-Aid was made by American Earle Dickson in 1921. The idea came to him by chance. Dickson’s wife Josephine often cut her fingers in the kitchen. At that time gauze（纱布） and adhesive tape（胶带）didn’t come together. People had to cut them to the right size. Dickson found they were always too big and soon fell off. So he put a piece of gauze on the center of a piece of tape. This is how he made the first Band-Aid.

Later Dickson’s new inventions became very popular all around the world.

Bubblegum was invented by accident. In 1928, American gum company worker Walter E. Diemer played around with new chewing gum recipes. Chewing gum had already been invented more than half a century before then. But Diemer found that the gum he made was easy to blow. He blew a bubble and then saw the possibilities. He took some of his new gum to a shop and it sold out in a single afternoon. Since then, Dubble Bubble—the first brand of bubblegum—has made kids happy all around the world.