Who or What Is Rube Goldberg?

by Donna Jones Pelkie

The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is named after cartoonist Reuben Lucius Goldberg, the spirit of whose work inspires the contest's wacky machines.

For 55 years, Goldberg's award-winning cartoons satirized machines and gadgets which he saw as excessive. His cartoons combined simple machines and common household items to create complex, wacky and diabolically logical machines that accomplished mundane and trivial tasks. His inventions became so widely known that Webster's Dictionary added “rube goldberg” to its listing, defining it as “accomplishing by extremely complex, roundabout means what seemingly could be done simply.”

During his life, Goldberg's drawings included sports cartoons, comic strips and political cartoons, but he is best known today for his ridiculously complex machines.

His “inventions” can actually work. By inventing excessively complex ways to accomplish simple tasks, he entertained and poked fun at the gadgets designed to make life easier. In his words, the machines were a “symbol of man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results.” He believed that most people preferred doing things the hard way instead of using simpler, more direct paths to accomplish goals.

Argonne's Division of Educational Programs and Communications and Public Affairs Division sponsor the high school contest in collaboration with Chicago Children's Museum and with the collegiate National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest held annually at Purdue University. The event is licensed by Rube Goldberg, Inc.