A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in a comically overcomplicated way. First appearing in a cartoon for the New York Evening Mail, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal. The term was used to describe complex contraptions, and was featured in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Such machines have been featured in popular culture (for example, a breakfast scene in Pee-wee's Big Adventure), used in education, and are the subjects of many different Rube Goldberg competitions. There have been other forms of expressions that are similar to Rube Goldberg machines, such as W. Heath Robinson's Heath Robinson contraptions.
History
The term "Rube Goldberg machine" comes from the cartoonist by the same name, Rube Goldberg, who would illustrate many of these machines. The first Rube Goldberg machine was drawn by him in 1914, titled the Automatic Weight-Reducing Machine drawn for the "Inventions!" section of the New York Evening Mail. In the cartoon, the machine uses 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. 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. It was also famously featured on a US postage stamp in 1995. The term "Rube Goldberg" was used in print to describe elaborate contraptions by 1928, 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". Because Rube Goldberg machines are contraptions derived from tinkering with the tools close at hand, parallels have been drawn with evolutionary processes. 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.
Competitions
In 1949, Purdue University in Indiana started the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, organized by the Phi chapter of Theta Tau and Triangle Fraternity, which continued until 1955. Theta Tau revived the competition in 1983 as a National Engineers Week celebration. The competition first went national in 1988. 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. The Chain Reaction Contraption Contest 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. 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.
Related
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