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Most senior citizens and baby boomers
think that Rube was an eccentric inventor who created elaborate
contraptions to accomplish ordinary, simple tasks. Most of the
Generation X group like myself don't know whether Rube was real or
fictional. Some younger people have never even heard of Rube
Goldberg.
Rube Goldberg was a popular cartoonist
whose work appeared in newspapers throughout the United States from
the early 1900s to the 1960s. His drawings included sports cartoons,
comic strips and political cartoons, but he is best known today for
the complicated machines that he drew.
Born in San Francisco in 1883, he
earned a degree in engineering upon his father's insistence. This
engineering background served as a basis for his cartoons of machine
contraptions that would take an easy task, such as swatting a fly,
and require at least a dozen steps to accomplish it. Rube made sure
that every one of the machines in his drawings could work.
Webster's New World Dictionary
describes Rube Goldberg as an adjective: "Designating any very
complicated invention, machine, scheme, etc. laboriously contrived
to perform a seemingly simple operation."
To illustrate this point, take a look
at a typical Rube Goldberg invention -- his method for a simple fly
swatter -- without the drawing:
Carbolic acid (A) drips on a string
(B) causing it to break and release elastic of bean shooter (C)
which projects ball (D) into bunch of garlic (E) causing it to
fall into syrup can (F) and splash syrup violently against side
wall. Fly (G) buzzes with glee and goes for syrup, his favorite
dish. Butler-dog (H) mistakes hum of fly's wings for door buzzer
and runs to meet visitor, pulling rope (I) that turns stop-go
signal (J) and causes baseball bat (K) to sock fly, which falls
to floor unconscious. As fly drops to floor, pet trout (L) jumps
for him, misses and lands in net (M). Weight of fish forces shoe
(N) down on fallen fly and puts him out of the running for all
time. If fish catches the fly, the shoe can be used for cracking
nuts.
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second column in this article]
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In addition to being a Pulitzer
Prize-winning cartoonist and an engineer, Rube was also a sculptor
and author, but it was his cartoons that earned him fame and
fortune. Many people think that the inventor pictured in his
cartoons is Goldberg himself, but it was actually a fictional
character that Rube named Professor Butts.
What do Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbes,
Garfield and Bart Simpson have in common with Snoopy, Blondie, Hagar
the Horrible and Beetle Bailey? Or, to put it another way, what do
they all have to do with Rube Goldberg?
Their creators are all past winners of
the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award, which is given out
annually to the year's top cartoonist. The Reuben, as you may have
guessed, is named after Rube Goldberg, the society's first
president.
His legacy also includes the various
Rube Goldberg machine contests each year among engineering students,
which honor him by designing machines that use the most complex
processes to complete a simple task.
Rube Goldberg succeeded while tens of
thousands of other people who created cartoons, inventions and
sculptures failed to get them off the ground. Rube Goldberg
succeeded by taking an easy task and telling how to devise a
complicated contraption to achieve it.
He died in 1970 at the age of 87.
Today, 33 years later, his name is synonymous with inventions --
even though he was not an inventor himself.
[Paul
Niemann]
To see what some of Rube's inventions
would have looked like, follow a
link at
www.InventionMysteries.com.
Paul Niemann can be reached at
niemann7@aol.com.
Copyright Paul Niemann 2003
Last week's
column in LDN:
"The story of the Leaning Tower of Pisa … and the Illinois inventor
who figured out how to straighten it"
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