3. AUTOMOBILE. 4. Light bulb

3. AUTOMOBILE

If the steam engine mobilized industry, the ……… mobilized people. While ideas for personal vehicles had been around for years, Karl Benz's 1885 Motorwagen, powered by an internal burning engine of his own design, is widely considered the first …….. . Henry Ford's improvements in the production process -- and effective marketing -- brought the price and the desire for owning an ……… into the reach of most Americans. Europe soon followed.

The ………. 's effect on commerce, society and culture is hard to overestimate. Most of us can jump in our ……… and go wherever we want whenever we want, effectively expanding the size of any community to the distance we're willing to drive to shop or visit friends. Our cities are largely designed and built around ………. access, with paved roads and parking lots taking up huge amounts of space and a big chunk of our governments' budgets. The……… industry has fueled enormous economic growth worldwide, but it's also generated a lot of pollution.

4. Light bulb

If there's a common theme to this list, it's that no major invention came from a single stroke of genius from a single inventor. Every invention is built by gradually improving earlier designs, and the person usually associated with an invention is the first person to make it commercially viable. Such is the case with the ………. We immediately think of Thomas Edison as the ………’s inventor, but dozens of people were working on similar ideas in the 1870s, when Edison developed his incandescent ………. Joseph Swan did similar work in Britain at the time, and eventually the two merged their ideas into a single company, Ediswan.

The ……… itself works by transmitting electricity through a wire with high resistance known as a filament. The waste energy created by the resistance is expelled as heat and light. The glass bulb encases the filament in a vacuum or in inert gas, preventing inflammation.

You might think the ……. changed the world by allowing people to work at night or in dark places (it did, to some extent), but we already had relatively cheap and efficient gas lamps and other light sources at the time. It was actually the infrastructure that was built to provide electricity to every home and business that changed the world. Today, our world is filled with powered devices than we can plug in pretty much anywhere. We have the ……… to thank for it.

viable, a жизнеспособный

incandescent, a [ˌ ɪ nkæ n'des(ə )nt] раскалённый, накалённыйдобела

filament, n нитьнакала

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