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Reuben Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 � December 7, 1970) was a cofounder and first president of the National Cartoonists Society. He is one of the most famous cartoonists in history. He earned lasting fame for his "Rube Goldberg machines" � devices that are exceedingly complex and perform very simple tasks in a very indirect and convoluted way. He was posthumously awarded the National Cartoonist Society Gold Key Award in 1980.
Goldberg earned a degree in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1904. Goldberg was hired by the city of San Francisco as an engineer out of college. However his fondness for drawing cartoons prevailed, and after just a few months he left the city to employ for a job with the San Francisco Chronicle as a sports cartoonist. The following year he took a job with the San Francisco Bulletin where he remained until 1907, when he relocated to New York City.
He drew cartoons for several newspapers, including the New York Evening Journal and the New York Evening Mail. His work entered syndication in 1915, beginning his nationwide popularity. A prolific artist, Goldberg produced several cartoon series simultaneously; titles included Mike and Ike, Bob McNutt, Foolish Questions, Lala Palooza, and The Weekly Meeting of the Tuesday Women's Club.
While all these series were quite popular, the one which led to his lasting fame involved a character named Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. In this series, Goldberg would draw labeled schematics of comical "inventions" which would later bear his name. In 1995, "Rube Goldberg's Inventions", depicting Professor Butts' Self-Operating Napkin, was one of 20 strips included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative U.S. postage stamps.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning in 1948.
Later in his career Goldberg was employed by the New York Journal American, remaining there until his retirement in 1964. During his retirement he occupied himself with making bronze sculptures. Several one-man shows of his work were organized, the last one of his lifetime being in 1970 at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.. Shortly afterward, he died at the age of 87; he is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
In addition to his Pulitzer Prize in 1948, he received the National Cartoonist Society Gold T-Square Award in 1955, their Reuben Award for 1967, and was given their Gold Key Award (their Hall of Fame) posthumously in 1980.
Rube Goldberg machines
A Rube Goldberg machine or device is any exceedingly complex apparatus that performs a very simple task in a very indirect and convoluted way. Rube devised and drew several such pataphysical devices. The best examples of his machines have an anticipation factor. The fact that something so wacky is happening can only be topped by it happening in a suspenseful manner. A Rube Goldberg machine usually has at least ten steps. One story about Rube Goldberg is that while sleep-walking barefoot in a cactus field, he screamed out an idea about a self-operating napkin.
The term also applies as a classification for generally over-complicated apparatus or software. It first appeared in Webster's Third New International Dictionary with the definition, "accomplishing by extremely complex roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply."
In Britain, such a device would be called a Heath Robinson contraption, after the British cartoonist who also drew fantastic comic machinery, in his case tended by bespectacled men in overalls. See also Roland Emett, who created many actual working machines of this type, such as the Breakfast Machine in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
In Denmark, they would be called Storm P maskiner after the Danish cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen.
In Japan, they are called ?????? (pitagora souchi), which means Pythagorean Machine.
In Spain there is not a particular noun to mean such machines, but a reference akin to Goldberg's machines existed: Catalan cartoonist ] made up and drew many of those devices for a section in the TBO magazine, allegedly designed by some Professor Franz from Copenhagen.
The Norwegian cartoonist and storyteller Kjell Aukrust created a cartoon character named Reodor Felgen who constantly invented complex machinery. Though it was often built out of unlikely parts, it always performed very well. Felgen stars as the inventor of an extremely powerful but overly complex car Il Tempo Gigante in the Ivo Caprino animated puppet-film ] (1975).
Another related phenomenon is the Japanese art of useful but unusable contraptions called chindogu.
Rube Goldberg machines on media
In Nick Park's "Wallace and Gromit" series of shorts and features, Wallace's inventions are clearly Rube Goldberg-esque. A recurring joke throughout A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and Curse of the Were-Rabbit are the absurd contraptions Wallace invents. Good examples are Wallace's "Knit-O-Matic machine" or the device that catapults a dollop of jam onto a piece of toast as it springs out of a pop-up toaster. However, it is more likely to be compared to the works of Heath Robinson, as Rube Golberg is comparatively little known in the UK.
In the cartoon show The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, the villain called "The Hooded Claw" used, in every episode, a Goldbergian machine in order to kill Penelope, the protagonist. Ironically, the needless complexity of the traps often gave the Ant Hill Mob enough time to save Penelope.
In the cartoon series Futurama, Professor Hubert Farnsworth often makes huge, complex machinery perform in an overstated and dramatic way to produce simple things such as a glow in the dark nose (it also translates Alien into even more incomprehensible Galactic).
Rube Goldberg devices frequently appear in the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with or without partner Marc Caro. A recurring theme in Delicatessen is the character Aurore attempting to kill herself using such devices, which backfire and force her to live another day. In The City of Lost Children, similar machines abound, including a famous set piece in which a little girl's teardrop triggers a chain of events that ultimately causes a shipwreck. The films ] and A Very Long Engagement expand this theme further, moving from the physiological to the metaphysical. As noted by Philadelphia City Paper's Sam Wood, fate itself operates as a Rube Goldberg device, "an endless chain of tricky coincidences whose final result is utterly beyond prediction."
In the film Final Destination, as well as its sequels Final Destination 2 and Final Destination 3, the way "death" tracks down and kills its victims resemble deadly Rube Goldberg machines.
The 4400 television series makes use of a "ripple effect" Rube Goldberg plot element.
Bernard Werber also use a metaphorical Rube Goldberg machine to �correct� a problem in The Thanatonauts.
In the 1999 book Florida Roadkill by Tim Dorsey, the main character, a serial killer named Serge A. Storms, uses a Rube Goldberg device involving a length of wire, an electric motor, a beer can, and the shock wave caused by a space shuttle launch to kill a man with a shotgun. In a later book in the series, Triggerfish Twist, he uses another such device involving wire, gasoline, two floodlights, and a hula hoop to burn someone to death.
In the cartoon series Family Guy, Peter Griffin uses a Rube Goldberg machine (one almost exactly like the breakfast machine in Pee Wee's Big Adventure), that comically shoots Peter with a gun rather than make breakfast.
Rube Goldberg machines are often used by Tom in Tom and Jerry.
The Looney Tunes short "Hook, Line, and Stinker" ended with the Wile E. Coyote character attempting to use a Rube Goldberg machine to capture the Road Runner. Many other Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts employ such devices.
The 1990 movie Back to the Future Part III features a Wild West version of a Rube Goldberg device. One of the main characters, Dr Emmett "Doc" Brown (Christopher Lloyd), is transported back in time to the year 1885, where he works as a blacksmith. When "rescued" by Marty McFly (Michael J Fox), he is working on an enormous steam-powered machine. The machine is easily 3 to 4 metres tall, with no immediate clue as to its function. When put into action, it shakes and groans and emits whistles and steam sounds (think of a loud steam engine) for about 20 seconds. When it falls silent, it produces two small irregularly-shaped bits of ice; it's an icemaker. Another such machine in the same movie is the Wakeup/ Breakfast Cooking Machine, which at the right time prepars toast and eggs for the Doc. There is another scene in the first film where there is another Rube Goldberg machine that Doc uses to feed his dog Einstein.
The 1990 film Home Alone and its three sequels find the main character often employing the use of Goldberg-esque devices to trap and/or slow down the progress of burglars attempting to ransack his home.
Swiss artists David Weiss and Peter Fischli produced a film in 1987 entitled The Way of Things (Der Lauf Der Dinge), which documents the motions of a large-scale Goldberg-style kinetic art installation. This installation was then re-worked in the Honda television commercial Cog, which featured a Rube Goldberg machine made from the parts of an Accord.
Tim Fort, a kinetic artist from Minnesota, creates chain-reaction gadgets that are reminiscent of both domino tumbling and classical Rube Goldberg gadgets. His gadgets are capable of doing simple tasks such as playing music with water-filled bottles or performing animation with a device resembling a flip book. He is currently exploring the idea of making a working digital computer using nothing but kinetic-art techniques.
In the 1985 film Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Pee-wee uses a Rube Goldberg device to make his breakfast, and this same device was later featured in Big Fish as the main character's science fair entry. Another 1985 film, The Goonies, also prominently featured several Rube Goldberg devices, both as performing practical applications (opening the front gate to let someone inside), and springing traps.
A Rube Goldberg machine is featured in the Broadway musical Hairspray; it is used to close up Wilbur Turnblad's joke shop in Baltimore.
The music video for An Honest Mistake by The Bravery features a Rube Goldberg machine that fires a flaming arrow that ironically misses its target and leaves the band members in a confused state.
In the 7th season X-Files episode "The Goldberg Variation" Mulder and Scully meet a man who has a great amount of good luck that manifests as a sort of Rube Goldberg device, with improbable events combining to effect a certain outcome.
In an episode of the cartoon series Taz-Mania the Platypus brothers created a Rube Goldberg device, the final purpose of which was to alert one of the brothers to perform an action that the machine itself could easily have done.
In a sketch of The Andy Milonakis Show, Andy creates a Rube Goldberg device to turn on his reading lamp (a meter away from him). The machine incorporated balloons, various toys, bowling balls, and his friend Larry.
In a short segment in an episode of Animaniacs, titled "Wakko's Gizmo", Wakko creates and sets off an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine in order to flatten a whoopie cushion.
A children's educational television show named ???????? ("Pitagora Suicchi", or "Pythagorean Switch") features Rube Goldberg machines at the beginning and end of each episode, and at transition points within episodes. The show has been produced by NHK since 2002.
The satirical Mad Magazine features a comic strip entitled, "Spy vs. Spy", in which Cold War spies from opposing countries take turns trying to eliminate each other with improbably-designed traps.
The children's picturebook series Mechanical Harry by New Zealander Bob Kerr features the a boy who makes Goldberg like machines, with long and convolted steps. These include a pancake machine, dishwashing machine and firewood splitter among others.
Rube Goldberg machines in videogames
In 1993, Sierra Entertainment released the computer game The Incredible Machine, designed around the Rube Goldberg concept. Three more games were also released in the series, The Even More Incredible Machine, Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions, and The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions. None of these software titles are still sold: however, they are available via Gametap.com.
In Germany the video game company PepperGames is still producing and selling games that have the Rube Goldberg concept. Their names are "Crazy Machines" "Crazy Machines - Neue Herausforderungen" and "Crazy Machines - Neues aus dem Labor".
One popular function of Garry's Mod, A mod for the computer game Half-Life 2, enables you to manipulate objects and characters within a physics based environment. It is one contemporary example where Rube Goldberg machine principle is common. Elaborate traps or machines can be built by the player using a range of in-game objects. The resulting inventions are often recorded and are downloadable from gaming websites.
In Monkey Island 2's acid pit scene, a Rube Goldberg style trap is featured. There was also a C64 game from the mid-80s called Creative Contraptions, similar to The Incredible Machine, but much simpler, shorter and easier.
In 2005 a video game called Trapt used various Goldberg themed elements used to protect a homicidal princess, they usually all lead to a horribly gruesome death through uses of many little nonsensical things
Other references
The Ideal Novelty and Toy Company released a board game called Mouse Trap in 1963 that was based on Rube Goldberg's ideas (this game is currently made by Hasbro).
LambdaMOO contains a working The Rube Goldberg Contraption, which can generally be found on the Pool Deck.
See also
External links
- The Official Rube Goldberg Web Site
- Incredible home-made contraption
- Toonopedia entry
- Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Oral History Interview, 1970
- Annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest
- Detailed specifications of an award-winning Rube Goldberg machine from the New York City science fair
- Tim Fort's Kinetic Art
- NCS Awards
- Flash video from youtube.com and Video from video.google.com of Japanese Rube Golberg machines from Japanese Pitagora Suicchi children's educational television show produced by NHK.
- Honda Cog commercial.
- A golf themed Goldberg machine