Rube goldberg simple machines biography examples

Rube Goldberg, who was born in San Francisco in 1883, was originally an engineer. He graduated from the College of Mining Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley in 1904.

For six months he mapped water and sewer lines until he could stand it no longer. He then took a lower-paying job cartooning at the San Francisco Chronicle.

"What he cared about most was if he made you laugh," said his granddaughter Jennifer George, whom we spoke to in 2018. Her 2013 book, "The Art of Rube Goldberg," describes his extensive output of cartoons, writing and even sculpture, before his death in 1970.

Goldberg left California for New York in 1907 and was hired by the New York Evening Mail. One of his early cartoons for the newspaper showed a badly injured man who had fallen from a 50-story building and a woman asking "Are you hurt?" The man replied "No, I am taking my beauty sleep."

It was a hit, and over the next two years he drew 449 more in the Foolish Questions series. Readers loved sending in suggestions.

He also created a series called "I'm the Guy." It featured statements such as "I'm the guy who put the hobo in Hoboken" and "I'm the guy who put the sand in the sandwich," starting a national fad.

Among his cartoon characters was Boob McNutt, who always managed to screw up as he attempted to help someone.

Goldberg's invention drawings began in 1912 and made him into a household name, according to an exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

The first of his elaborate contraptions was "The Simple Mosquito Exterminator," a classic Rube Goldberg machine. A mosquito enters window, walks along a board strewn with small pieces of steak, falls unconscious because of chloroform fumes from a sponge, and falls on platform. He wakes up, looks through the telescope to see the reflection of a bald head in a mirror, and jumps in fear off spring-board through, killing himself when he hits the mirror, falling dead into can.

For the next 20 years, Goldberg provided a new Rube Goldberg machine about every two weeks. He continued on a less frequent basis until 1964.

He invented the character Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, who created his own machines to open screen doors, shine shoes and find soap dropped from the bathtub. According to "The Art of Rube Goldberg," the character was inspired by two professors that Goldberg found particularly boring at the College of Mining Engineering: Samuel B. Christy, who lectured at length on time-and-motion efficiency, and Frederick Slate, who once showed students the "barodik," a convoluted machine meant to measure the weight of Earth.

The invention cartoons mocked "the elaborate world of machinery," wrote Adam Gopnik in his introduction to the book, by mocking the "larger idea of efficiency." Goldberg had "a poetic intuition common to all great cartoonists," Gopnik wrote.