*from Purdue University News Service
Rube Goldberg
The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is named after cartoonist Reuben Lucius Goldberg, the spirit of whose work inspires the contest"s weird machines and crazy mechanisms. The best-known Rube Goldberg machine contest is the national event held annually by Theta Tau at Purdue University.
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 listings, 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," drawn for our pleasure, can actually work. By inventing excessively complex ways to accomplish simple tasks, he entertained us and poked fun at the gadgets designed to make our lives 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.
History of the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest
Rube Goldberg Machine Contests bring Goldberg"s cartoons to life in a way that pulls students away from traditional ways of looking at problems and sends them spinning into the intuitive, chaotic realm of imagination. The resulting inventions are collections of bits and pieces, parts of now useless machines, scraped together to achieve an innovative, imaginative, yet somehow logical contraption to conquer the job at hand. The contest shows us all the need for simplicity and the pitfalls of complexity.
In 1949, at the peak of the Goldberg era, the two engineering fraternities at Purdue University, Theta Tau and Triangle, developed their own version of the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. The contest was held as part of the Engineer"s Ball, also sponsored at Purdue by the two fraternities. The competition was fierce between the two rival fraternities as raids on the machines before the contest and sabotage at the contest occurred more than once. Soon thereafter, rules were made to disqualify teams attempting such devious actions. The contest died out with the Engineer"s Ball in 1955, when the two fraternities no longer sponsored the event.
In 1983, some members at Theta Tau"s Phi Chapter became interested in an old trophy they found one day while cleaning. It was the original traveling trophy from Purdue"s first Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. After searching out information on the contest, they revived it and produced a guide for others to follow during competition.
The contest"s popularity has grown each year that Theta Tau has hosted it at Purdue University. Winners from early years appeared in nationwide press releases and television appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show, as well as NBC"s The Today Show.
All of this media attention finally paid off in 1988 when Mike Barrett brought about the first National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. The nationwide television, radio, and printed media attention has promoted the growth of the contest to make it bigger and better each year. In 1992, the contest appeared on televisions all over the world as the TV show "Beyond 2000" came to Purdue to film the contest and even spent a day filming the progress of Theta Tau"s machine in the fraternity"s cramped basement.
The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest has exceeded the hopes and dreams of its founders. The contest now has the honor of being Purdue"s largest media event, drawing more attention than any sport or event at the university. Because of the experience of the contest chairmen of Phi Chapter of Theta Tau at Purdue University, the world wide media attention, and the generosity of the contest"s sponsors, the contest continues to grow even today.
Every year, the fraternity, Purdue, and the nation anxiously await the wild display of innovation and genius, as well as confusion and sometimes despair which always accompany the running of the contest.
RUBE GOLDBERG & RUBE GOLDBERG MACHINE CONTEST are ® & © of RUBE GOLDBERG INC. All Rights Are Reserved Worldwide.