Engineering:Rube Goldberg machine

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More recently, such machines have been fully constructed for entertainment (for example, a breakfast scene in Pee-wee's Big Adventure)[1] and in Rube Goldberg competitions.[2]

History

File:Something for nothing (1940).ogv
Something for Nothing (1940), a short film featuring Goldberg illustrating the U.S. Patent Office (and its policy regarding perpetual motion machines), and the power efficiency of gasoline
File:Automatic Weight-Reducing Machine.webp
The Automatic Weight-Reducing Machine (1914)

The first Rube Goldberg machine was drawn by Rube Goldberg in 1914, titled the Automatic Weight-Reducing Machine drawn for the "Inventions!" section of the New York Evening Mail. In the cartoon, the machine utilizes a variety of objects to get an overweight person to become trapped in a hole. The man is then starved until he is thin enough to pass through the hole and escape.[3] Another such machine is featured in Goldberg's 1931 cartoon Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin, which was later reprinted in a few book collections, including the postcard book Rube Goldberg's Inventions! and the hardcover Rube Goldberg: Inventions, both compiled by Maynard Frank Wolfe from the Rube Goldberg Archives.[4] It was also famously featured on a US postage stamp in 1995.[5]

The term "Rube Goldberg" was used in print to describe elaborate contraptions by 1928,[6] and appeared in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language in 1966 meaning "having a fantastically complicated improvised appearance", or "deviously complex and impractical".[7] Because Rube Goldberg machines are contraptions derived from tinkering with the tools close at hand, parallels have been drawn with evolutionary processes.[8]

More recently, Rube Goldberg machines have been used to educate students. Organizations, such as Brains & Motions utilize such machines to educate STEM and engineering principles, such as simple machines, kinetic and potential energy, work, momentum, and other concepts. [9]

Competitions

Rube Goldberg machine designers participating in a competition in New Mexico

In early 1987, Purdue University in Indiana started the annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, organized by the Phi chapter of Theta Tau, a national engineering fraternity. In 2009, the Epsilon chapter of Theta Tau established a similar annual contest at the University of California, Berkeley.

Since around 1997, the kinetic artist Arthur Ganson has been the emcee of the annual "Friday After Thanksgiving" (FAT) competition sponsored by the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Teams of contestants construct elaborate Rube Goldberg style chain-reaction machines on tables arranged around a large gymnasium. Each apparatus is linked by a string to its predecessor and successor machine. The initial string is ceremonially pulled, and the ensuing events are videotaped in closeup, and simultaneously projected on large screens for viewing by the live audience. After the entire cascade of events has finished, prizes are then awarded in various categories and age levels. Videos from several previous years' contests are viewable on the MIT Museum website.[10]

The Chain Reaction Contraption Contest[11] is an annual event hosted at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in which high school teams each build a Rube Goldberg machine to complete some simple task (which changes from year to year) in 20 steps or more (with some additional constraints on size, timing, safety, etc.).

On the TV show Food Network Challenge, competitors in 2011 were once required to create a Rube Goldberg machine out of sugar.[12]

An event called 'Mission Possible' in the Science Olympiad involves students building a Rube Goldberg-like device to perform a certain series of tasks.[13]

An England competition-based reality TV show named Contraption Masters has contestants create Rube Goldberg machines in a specified time limit, then test their machines. The machines are then scored under creativity, number of interventions, and number of steps.[14]

The Rube Goldberg Institute holds many annual Rube Goldberg machine contests. In addition to the Live Rube Goldberg Machine contest, the Institute holds a number of virtual contests, such as the Virtual Rube Goldberg Machine contest. The Institute also holds the "Rube Goldberg Unreal Engine Challenge", a competition in partnership with Epic Games where contestants create a simulated Rube Goldberg machine in the video game engine Unreal Engine, and the Rube Goldberg NASEF Minecraft Challenge in partnership with the North America Scholastic Esports Federation where contestants create a simulated Rube Goldberg machine in the video game Minecraft. The RGI also holds the "Rube Goldberg Crazy Contraption Cartoon Contest", in which contestants draw a cartoon depicting a Rube Goldberg machine.[15][2]

Similar expressions and artists worldwide

George Rhoads' kinetic art sculptures, such as Archimedean Excogitation (pictured), share many elements with Rube Goldberg machines.

There are many artists and art expressions worldwide similar to the comedic effects of Rube Goldberg machines.

Australian cartoonist Bruce Petty created cartoons depicting such themes as the economy, international relations or other social issues as complicated interlocking machines similar to Rube Goldberg machines that manipulate, or are manipulated by, people.[16]

In Denmark, devices akin to Rube Goldberg machines are known as Storm P maskiner ('Storm P machines'), after the Danish inventor and cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen.[17]

Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci described an alarm clock-esque device which, utilizing a slow drip of water, would fill a vessel which then operated a lever to wake the sleeper.[18]

American artist Tim Hawkinson made several art pieces that contain complicated apparatuses that are generally used to make abstract art or music. Many of them are centered on the randomness of other devices (such as a slot machine) and are dependent on them to create some menial effect.[19]

British cartoonist and illustrator W. Heath Robinson drew mechanical devices similar to Rube Goldberg machines.[20]

Many of Goldberg's ideas were utilized in popular culture for the comedic effect of creating a crazy rigmarole for a simple task.

  • In The Goonies, a Rube Goldberg machine is used to open up a picket fence.
  • In Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Rube Goldberg-like machines are used to make breakfast. Other Rube Goldberg machines are also used to make breakfast in Back to the Future and Back to the Future III.
  • In Ernest Goes to Jail, a Rube Goldberg machine is used to turn on a television set.
  • In The Money Pit, a series of crashing boards, falling cans, and other mishaps in a construction site ends up launching the character Walter Fielding into a fountain[21]
  • In Wallace and Gromit, the character Wallace creates and uses many Rube Goldberg-like machines for a numerous number of tasks (such as getting dressed). The inspiration for these contraptions, however, is the British cartoonist W. Heath Robinson [1]
  • In the OK Go music video for This Too Shall Pass, a Rube Goldberg machine spanning along a half-mile course and utilizing over 700 household objects is used to shoot the members of the band with paint from a paint gun.[22]
  • In the board game Mouse Trap, players assemble a Rube Goldberg machine to trap their opponent's mouse. Once a player's mouse is trapped, that player is eliminated from the game. Last person standing is then deemed the winner. [23]
  • Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) is an art film that documents a 30-minute-long causal chain assembled of everyday objects, resembling a Rube Goldberg machine. [24]
  • PythagoraSwitch (ピタゴラスイッチ, Pitagora Suicchi) is a Japanese television show that features Rube Goldberg machines[17]

See also

  • Archimedean Excogitation
  • Cog (Honda advertisement)
  • Deathtrap (plot device)
  • Domino effect
  • Final Destination, a horror film series featuring complex Rube Goldberg machine-style chains of cause and effect for character deaths
  • Gyro Gearloose
  • Kludge
  • Mouse Trap (1960s game)
  • Perchang, a game in which the player operates a Rube-Goldberg like machine to get balls into a funnel
  • Robodonien
  • Rolling ball sculpture
  • Surprise!
  • This Too Shall Pass (OK Go song), the video of which features a Rube Goldberg style machine
  • Turbo encabulator

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Those magnificent Explainers and their made-up machines | Science and Industry Museum" (in en-GB). 2019-05-31. https://blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/magnificent-explainers-made-up-machines/. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Do you Rube? Join the contests!" (in en). http://localhost/rube-goldberg-contests/. 
  3. ↑ "Rube Goldberg - History of Creating Inventions, Machines and Past Projects.". http://www.rube-goldberg.com/wiki/goldberg-machines.html. 
  4. ↑ Wolfe, Maynard Frank (2000). Rube Goldberg: Inventions. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-86724-9. 
  5. ↑ Tumey, Paul (2014-02-24). "Rube Goldberg Butts In" (in en-US). https://www.tcj.com/rube-goldberg-butts-in/. 
  6. ↑ Atkinson, J. Brooks (10 February 1928). "THE PLAY; 'Rain or Shine,' Joe Cook". The New York Times: p. 26. "He then introduces the Fuller Construction Orchestra, which is one of those Rube Goldberg crazy mechanical elaborations for passing a modest musical impulse from a buzz." 
  7. ↑ Marzio, Peter C. (1973). Rube Goldberg: His Life and Work. Harper and Row. p. 118. ISBN 0-06-012830-5. 
  8. ↑ Beeby, Morgan (2019). "Evolution of a family of molecular Rube Goldberg contraptions.". PLOS Biology 17 (8). doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000405. PMID 31415567. 
  9. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named :1
  10. ↑ "Friday After Thanksgiving: Chain Reaction". MIT Museum [website]. http://web.mit.edu/museum/programs/fat.html. 
  11. ↑ "Chain Reaction Contraption Contest". http://www.chainreactioncontest.org/. 
  12. ↑ "Food Network Challenge: Sugar Inventions". http://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/food-network-challenge/12-series/sugar-inventions.html. 
  13. ↑ "Mission Possible". http://www.soinc.org/mission_c. 
  14. ↑ "Richard Hammond to host new Channel 4 show Crazy Contraptions" (in en). 2022-03-22. https://www.maldonandburnhamstandard.co.uk/news/20012679.richard-hammond-host-new-channel-4-show-crazy-contraptions/. 
  15. ↑ "Rube Goldberg – Home of the Official Rube Goldberg Machine Contests" (in en-US). https://www.rubegoldberg.com/. 
  16. ↑ "Bruce Petty" (in en). https://www.lambiek.net/artists/p/petty_bruce.htm. 
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Acharya, Sushil; Sirinterlikci, Arif (2010-04-01). "Introducing Engineering Design Through an Intelligent Rube Goldberg Implementation" (in en). Journal of Technology Studies 36 (2). doi:10.21061/jots.v36i2.a.7. ISSN 1071-6084. https://jotsjournal.org/articles/10.21061/jots.v36i2.a.7. 
  18. ↑ Wallace, Robert (1972). The World of Leonardo: 1452–1519. New York: Time-Life Books. p. 108. 
  19. ↑ Decter, Joshua (1996-02-01). "Tim Hawkinson" (in en-US). https://www.artforum.com/events/tim-hawkinson-9-212381/. 
  20. ↑ "William Heath Robinson" (in en-GB). https://www.heathrobinsonmuseum.org/william-heath-robinson. 
  21. ↑ Grundhauser, Eric (2015-08-14). "A Surprisingly Uncomplicated Look At Rube Goldberg Machines in Movies" (in en). http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-surprisingly-uncomplicated-look-at-rube-goldberg-machines-in-movies. 
  22. ↑ Harlow, John (2010-03-21). "How a group of geeky scientists created the coolest pop video" (in en). https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/north-america-travel/us-travel/california/how-a-group-of-geeky-scientists-created-the-coolest-pop-video-p82g9l8xtnd. 
  23. ↑ Mouse Trap Game, 1963, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1599936/mouse-trap-game-board-game-hank-kramer/, retrieved 2026-03-24 
  24. ↑ "Fischli and Weiss: Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go)" (in en). https://www.moca.org/exhibition/fischli-and-weiss-der-lauf-der-dinge-the-way-things-go. 



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