Background Information

Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist made famous for his “Inventions” comic strip. He grew up in San Francisco and graduated from the University of California Berkeley with an engineering degree. After working for a short time as an engineer for the city of San Francisco, he took a job working for a newspaper. He contributed cartoons until he was published and eventually moved to New York where he drew daily cartoons and gained fame as a both cartoonist and well-known radio and television personality.

Rube Goldberg’s “Inventions” were fictitious, complex machines that performed simple tasks in a very roundabout way. In common usage, the term “Rube Goldberg” has come to mean any over-complicated system that performs tasks in an inefficient manner. Rube Goldberg’s “Inventions” usually consisted of a series of simple steps arranged in a convoluted and improbable manner. A chain reaction would be set up by a simple action that would eventually result in the desired function.

These complex machines provide opportunity and examples to study simple machines. A simple machine is a device with few or no moving parts. They are used to make work easier. The generally recognized simple machines are the lever, pulley, inclined plane, screw, wedge, and wheel and axle. Sometimes gears are also included in the list of simple machines. Rube Goldberg’s fictional “Inventions” usually made use of simple machines by combining them to create complex compound machines.

Check out the example below of Rube Goldberg's Self Operating Napkin: