Macintosh Gap-fill
The following text is taken from the Oxford dictionary of national Biography. To look at this wonderful website, click on the logo at the start of the article.
Listen to the podcast, write down the missing words and answer the three questions at the end of the passage. Bring your answers to class on a piece of paper.

Charles Macintosh was born in Glasgow on 29 December 1766, the son of George Macintosh a merchant of the city, and his wife, Mary Moore. Charles was (1)__________ at a Glasgow grammar school and afterwards at a school in Catterick Bridge, Yorkshire. Although placed for training in a Glasgow counting house, his (2)__________ hours were devoted to science. Initially interested in botany, he subsequently turned to chemistry, and he often attended the lectures of the chemist William Irvine, in Glasgow, and later those of the chemist and physician Joseph Black in Edinburgh. Charles embarked upon a (3)__________ business career before he was twenty. In 1786 he introduced from the Netherlands the manufacture of sugar of lead, known as lead acetate, and about the same time he (4)__________ making acetate of alumina. In 1797 he started the first alum works in Scotland and subsequently became connected with the St Rollox bleaching powder works, near Glasgow. Seven years earlier, in 1790, he had married Mary, daughter of Alexander Fisher of Glasgow, a merchant who claimed distant (5)__________ from certain kings of Scotland.

During a long business career Macintosh either invented or introduced from abroad a variety of chemically based processes with distinct commercial (6)__________. In addition to the manufacture of lead acetate these included a new method for calico printing, a variety of methods for dyeing cloth (particularly with Prussian blue), a valuable method of bleaching using dry chloride of lime, a method for preserving citric acid during ocean voyages, a (7)__________ process for yeast, and a variety of inventions relating to iron and steel. However, it was in about 1820, while experimenting with the by-products of coal gas, that Charles Macintosh came upon or rediscovered his lasting and best known innovation. This was a method for sealing a (8)__________ of rubber in between layers of cloth that still carries his name. The waterproof fabric he created, although subject to (9)__________ in extremes of cold or heat, was commercially successful for making garments, medical devices, nautical equipment, tents, and other products requiring (10)__________ and impermeability.

Macintosh was not the first to (11)__________ a way of using rubber to make fabrics waterproof but his chemical method (using cheap coal oil as a solvent) was particularly well suited to large-scale, economical manufacturing and he and his business partners also possessed (12)__________ skill as well in devising and then promoting a very large variety of rubber goods which could be (13)__________ using his method. It is likely that his method led to the first rubber products widely used by the general public for everyday purposes.

A patent for his waterproofing process was obtained in June 1823 and, based upon it, Macintosh, in (14)__________ with Thomas Hancock, established and then expanded a successful manufacturing and marketing business in Glasgow and Manchester. Many practical difficulties had to be (15)__________, but the material soon came into wide use, and as early as April 1824 Macintosh was in (16)__________ with the ill-fated Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin on the subject of a supply of waterproof canvas bags, air-beds, and pillows for use on an expedition. From the 1830’s Charles Macintosh & Co’s trade in waterproof fabric began to decline following the development of the railway network. This was because the travellers were now less exposed to the weather than they had been when traveling in stagecoaches or on horseback. However the rest of Macintosh’s business continued to grow and (17)__________. Macintosh was tireless in his efforts to promote his commercial interests, carrying on an extensive commercial correspondence in English and French (in which he was fluent) and travelling often to France, Germany, and Sardinia, as well as continuing to keep up to date with developments in chemistry; he regularly attended lectures at the University of Glasgow until he was over fifty.

In 1836 Macintosh's waterproofing patent was infringed by a London firm of silk mercers called Everington & Son, leading to a trial, celebrated in its day, in which the Macintosh’s patent was (18)__________ vindicated by the jury (even before the lord chief justice had completed his summing up). As a result Macintosh's name passed almost immediately into the English language, as a common name for waterproof (19)__________ and garments, having first been used in a private letter in 1836 by the painter William Powell Frith, and in America at least as early as 1840 by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In addition to his rubber business, Charles Macintosh had, in 1825, obtained a patent for converting malleable iron into steel, by (20)__________ it at a white heat to the action of gases charged with carbon, such as coal gas. Macintosh took great interest in the manufacture of iron and he rendered considerable (21)__________ assistance to James Beaumont Neilson in 1828 in bringing the latter's ‘hot-blast’ process into use. In return Neilson assigned to him a share in the patent.

To an extent, Macintosh's enduring connection with the commercial applications of rubber has (22)__________ his contemporary fame as an innovative chemist, but his discoveries in that branch of science were significant and led to his election in 1824 as a fellow of the Royal Society. Charles Macintosh died at Dunchattan, near Glasgow, on 25 July 1843. He was survived by two of his three children, one of whom, George, wrote a detailed (23)__________  of his father's life and business career.

24) What was Macintosh's most famous invention?
25) What is a 'Macintosh'?
26) There was a very famous joke around when my father was a young man. It went like this -
A man holding a cigarette approaches a stranger on the street and says, "Have you got a light, Mac?"
The stranger replies, " No but I've got a dark brown overcoat."
Can you explain why this is funny?