Wallace, of Wallace and Gromit, invents elaborate contraptions that don’t always work as planned. Nick Park, Wallace’s creator, said all his inventions are designed around the principle of “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” In each episode of Cracking Contraptions, Wallace unveils a newfangled invention, Gromit criticizes it, and something goes haywire. Perhaps you’ve seen Wallace’s gift-wrapping machine, folding RV, and self-erecting scaffold.
Who Was Rube Goldberg?
Reuben Garret Lucius Goldberg graduated from the University of California in 1904 with a degree in mining engineering. His first job was designing sewer pipes for the city of San Francisco. He didn’t stay with it for long, giving up a lifetime of sewage systems to draw cartoons instead. The switch changed his life.
In his lifetime, Goldberg produced more than 50,000 cartoons
The National Cartoonists Society’s award for the Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year is named The Reuben in Goldberg’s honor.
Rube Goldberg’s contrivances have been described as awkward and ridiculously complicated contraptions, convoluted mechanical whimsy, and you get the picture. His name stands for any laughingly impossible machinery that takes a simple process and makes it outlandish.
Goldberg drew his first invention in 1912
This elaborate contraption was “The Simple Mosquito Exterminator.” The mosquito enters window at (A) and walks along board, which is strewn with small chunks of rare steak. After munching steak as he walks, he is overcome by fumes coming from sponge (B) which is soaked in chloroform, and falls on platform (C). When he regains consciousness, he looks through telescope (D) and spies reflection of bald head (E) in mirror. He mistakes this for the real thing, jumps off spring-board (C) through (D) and dashes his brains out against the mirror, falling lifeless in can (F).
America was transitioning from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy during Goldberg’s earlier years
Smithsonian Mag says Goldberg’s invention drawings were “tongue-in-cheek critiques of the havoc wrought by industrialization. He believed that so-called labor-saving devices complicated life instead of simplifying it, an unintended consequence if there ever was one.
Some claim his most famous contraption was his Automatic Weight Reducing Machine
This particular gizmo consisted of a hot stove, a doughnut, a bomb, and a balloon. Together, they trapped fat people in a room without food. The only way to escape was to lose weight.
Rube Goldberg machines solve simple problems in the most ridiculously inefficient way possible
So much so that his name became synonymous with entertainingly absurd chain reaction machinery.
Britannica says Goldberg’s contraptions satirized Americans’ preoccupation with technology
One of his hundreds of inventions was an automatic stamp licker activated by a dwarf robot that overturned a can of ants onto a page of postage stamps, gum side up. The ants were then licked up by an anteater who had been starved for three days. In 1995, Goldberg’s outlandish inventions were honored with a U.S. postage stamp illustrating his Self-Operating Napkin.
Few Americans know of the English cartoonist Heath Robinson, born in 1872
The Heath Robinson Museum says the man is known as the creator of strange mechanical devices held together by bits of knotted string. Robinson is said to have enjoyed ridiculing the pomposity of experts with his early drawings. He was an illustrator focused on man’s self-importance and not a cartoonist like Goldberg, who was devoted to oddball machinery. The term Heath Robinson was adapted by British soldiers in World War I when he drew a series of cartoons mocking the enemy. One of the Tommies’ favorites was when he strapped the German Army to a goose.*
Rube Goldberg’s inventions made fun of technology and bureaucracy, two tempting targets
An inventor of the absurd and a social critic, he spoofed Americans’ romance with technology as well as their refusal to do things simply.
Two men in two countries
In 1917, the Oxford English Dictionary defined “any unnecessarily complicated and implausible contrivances” as Heath Robinsons. In 1931, Merriam-Webster defined Rube Goldbergs as “accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply.”
Smithsonian says Rube Goldberg’s name is an eponym for his famed “invention drawings”
He loved designing overly complicated machines made to fix simple problems. Goldberg believed that technology, intended to simplify people’s lives, often complicated it unnecessarily.
Goldberg drew a cover for Forbes magazine
The scene is of one of those “typical” families in the living room. Everyone, including the cat, is watching their own private flat-screen TV and ignoring each other. It seems obvious now as we all know many people are glued to their own entertainment devices and oblivious to the real world around them.
But know this:
Goldberg drew The Future of Home Entertainment 60 years ago when televisions were furniture – thick, not thin – and family members shared one instead of each having their own. If you had gone shopping for a TV in the Sixties, this is what a television showroom looked like:
The Rube Goldberg Institute for Innovation & Creativity
The Institute’s website tells us “how funny functionality invites us to think more deeply about machines and mechanized processes, gadgets and technologies, and the very human ways in which we use them. With over a billion searches, views, and posts involving Rube Goldberg, his influence on pop culture is more apparent today than ever before.”
Robinson and Goldberg machines are over-engineered, excessively convoluted, elaborate contraptions that go through unnecessarily complicated chain reactions
That’s what powers those elaborate falling domino designs we see online. Chain reactions are also a staple of some of today’s kinetic music sculptures, sometimes called marble music. Powered by gravity, a ball rolls and bounces its way downhill, looking a bit like a pinball game. When the ball lands on what resemble xylophone keys, it creates a musical note. Here’s a 13-second video clip titled Beethoven Marble Music.
Rube’s got game, too
Start with Rube Works: The Official Rube Goldberg Invention Game. Then try any of the dozen online games and apps. The goal is to create a series of Rube Goldberg devices by arranging a given collection of objects in a needlessly complex fashion so as to perform some simple task.
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*Goose-stepping, of course, but you knew that.
Bonus
In 2003, Honda ran this advert in the UK, Australia, and Sweden. They used real Honda parts to demonstrate Honda’s engineering precision. It took the Wieden+Kennedy ad agency seven months to complete this two-minute chain reaction, more artistic engineering than telly commercial. Viewers were gobsmacked.
Double Bonus
For a long time, the sheer impracticality of Goldberg’s inventions meant they couldn’t be created in real life. That severely underestimated what people with time on their hands can accomplish with ingenuity for comedic effect. It’s a rare occasion when I go over the top describing something, but here goes: The following wacky and ridiculously zany contrivance video is astonishing and mind-boggling.
OK Go – This Too Shall Pass official video
