Rube Goldberg facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Rube Goldberg
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Rube Goldberg in 1930
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| Born |
Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg
July 4, 1883 |
| Died | December 7, 1970 (aged 87) New York City, New York, U.S.
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| Resting place | Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, U.S. |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley |
| Occupation | Engineer, cartoonist, author, sculptor, inventor |
| Known for | Rube Goldberg machines, comic strips, political cartoons |
| Spouse(s) |
Irma Seeman
(m. 1916) |
| Children | 2, including George W. George |
Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970) was an American cartoonist, engineer, artist, and inventor. He is best known for drawing hilarious cartoons of wildly complex inventions designed to complete very simple daily tasks.
Today, the phrase "Rube Goldberg machine" describes any overly complicated contraption that uses a long chain reaction to do an easy job. For example, a machine might drop a marble down a chute, tip a teapot, pull a string, and trigger a fan just to wipe someone's face with a napkin!
During his long career, Goldberg created around 50,000 cartoons and earned many prestigious honors. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1948 for his powerful political artwork. He was also a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society. His creative ideas continue to inspire international engineering contests, popular movies, TV shows, board games, and science projects worldwide.
Contents
Who Was Rube Goldberg?
Rube Goldberg was a talented artist and trained engineer who combined science, humor, and storytelling. He used his background in mechanical systems to poke fun at how humans often make simple things unnecessarily difficult.
Early Life and Growing Up in California
Goldberg was born on July 4, 1883, in San Francisco, California. His parents were Max and Hannah Goldberg. He was the third of seven children in a Jewish family.
Goldberg showed a deep love for art at an early age. When he was just four years old, he started tracing pictures from books. As he grew up, he wanted to become an artist. He took his only formal drawing lessons from a local sign painter in San Francisco.
Engineering Education at UC Berkeley
Goldberg's father served as a city police and fire commissioner. He wanted his son to have a steady, reliable career rather than become a struggling artist. Because of this, he encouraged Rube to study engineering.
Goldberg attended the University of California, Berkeley, studying at the College of Mining and Engineering from 1901 to 1903. One of his college professors, Frederick Slate, assigned a curious project to the engineering class. He asked the students to build an elaborate scale called the "Barodik" that could theoretically calculate the weight of the Earth.
This assignment made a massive impression on Goldberg. He was fascinated by how serious scientists could spend enormous amounts of energy solving unusual, impractical problems. This blend of serious engineering and hilarious absurdity became the foundation for his most famous cartoons. Goldberg graduated with his degree in engineering in 1904.
Goldberg's Career as a Cartoonist
Although Goldberg had an engineering degree, his true passion was drawing cartoons. He decided to take a chance and follow his dream of working in the newspaper business.
From City Engineer to Sports Artist
In 1904, the city of San Francisco hired Goldberg as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department. He spent his days mapping water pipes and sewer lines. Goldberg found the job boring and uninspiring. After six months, he resigned to follow his creative ambitions.
He landed a job at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he worked as an assistant sports cartoonist. He worked hard, cleaned the office, and submitted drawings until editors began printing his work. The next year, he moved to the San Francisco Bulletin.
In 1907, Goldberg decided to move to New York City to find national fame. He found work drawing sports cartoons for the New York Evening Mail. His lively illustrations and witty commentary quickly made him popular with readers across the city.
Rise to National Cartoon Fame
Goldberg struck gold in 1908 with a comic strip titled Foolish Questions. The comic showed people asking obvious, silly questions, along with sarcastic, funny answers. It became a smash hit across the United States.
In 1912, Goldberg began including wacky invention drawings in his work. The New York Evening Mail partnered with the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which distributed his comics to newspapers all across the nation.
By 1915, Goldberg was earning $25,000 per year, an enormous salary for that era. Newspapers advertised him as the most popular cartoonist in America. The media mogul William Randolph Hearst attempted to recruit Goldberg to his own newspaper syndicate by offering him $50,000 a year. To keep their star artist, the New York Evening Mail matched the offer and set up a dedicated syndicate to distribute his cartoons nationwide.
Animation and Major Comic Series
Goldberg was also an early pioneer in animation. In 1916, he produced a series of seven humorous animated short films designed like comic newsreels:
- Leap Year (May 22, 1916)
- The Fatal Pie (June 5, 1916)
- From Kitchen Mechanic to Movie Star (June 19, 1916)
- Nutty News (July 3, 1916)
- Home Sweet Home (July 17, 1916)
- Losing Weight (July 31, 1916)
Throughout his career, Goldberg created dozens of popular comic characters and strips, including:
- Mike and Ike (They Look Alike)
- Telephonies
- Lala Palooza
- The Weekly Meeting of the Tuesday Women's Club
- Doc Wright, a serious drama comic strip published in 1933
Professor Lucifer Butts and the Inventions
The cartoon series that made Goldberg a legendary household name was The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, A.K. It ran in Collier's Weekly from January 1929 through December 1931.
In this series, Goldberg drew intricate diagrams that looked like official government patent applications. Each drawing featured an eccentric professor who invented ridiculously complicated machines to solve simple everyday problems. Goldberg used letters (A, B, C, D) to walk readers through every crazy step of the machine's chain reaction.
For example, his famous 1931 drawing showed a "Self-Operating Napkin." Lifting a soup spoon pulled a string, which jerked a ladle, which threw a cracker to a parrot. When the parrot jumped for the cracker, it tilted a perch, dumping seeds into a bucket. The heavy bucket pulled a cord that lit an automatic lighter, which set off a miniature skyrocket. The rocket sliced a sickle through a string, releasing a pendulum with an attached clockwork napkin that wiped the diner's chin clean!
Political Cartoons and Sculpting
As Goldberg grew older, he expanded his artistic work into serious political commentary and fine art.
Winning the Pulitzer Prize
In 1938, Goldberg became the editorial cartoonist for the New York Sun. He used his artwork to comment on international news, government policies, and world events.
In 1948, Goldberg won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his famous cartoon entitled "Peace Today." The drawing showed a small family home perched delicately on top of a giant atomic bomb sitting on the edge of a cliff. The cartoon served as a powerful warning about the dangers of war and the importance of global peace.
Goldberg moved to the New York Journal-American in 1949 and continued drawing editorial cartoons until his retirement in 1963.
Late Career as a Sculptor
After retiring from daily newspaper deadlines in the 1960s, Goldberg took up three-dimensional art. He created expressive bronze sculptures and portrait busts, showing that his artistic creativity remained strong even in his eighties. He held several successful gallery exhibitions of his sculptures in New York.
Personal and Family Life
In 1911, Goldberg designed and built an apartment building in San Francisco on Gough Street for his widowed father to manage and live in comfortably.
Goldberg married Irma Seeman on October 17, 1916. The couple settled in New York City, living on Central Park West, and raised two sons, Thomas and George.
During World War II, unfair prejudice and hostility arose toward public figures from different backgrounds, including Jewish cartoonists who drew strong political cartoons. To protect his sons from unfair treatment at university, Goldberg asked them to change their last name. Thomas chose the surname George, and his brother George took the same surname so the brothers would share an identity. George W. George later became a successful Broadway producer and Hollywood screenwriter.
The Legacy of Rube Goldberg Machines
Rube Goldberg's name became a permanent part of the English language. His machines inspired engineers, scientists, artists, and filmmakers around the globe.
Dictionary Definitions and Global Equivalents
By 1915, the adjective "Goldbergian" was used in newspapers. In 1966, the Random House Dictionary of the English Language officially added "Rube Goldberg" to the dictionary. It defined the term as having an improvised, fantastically complicated appearance, or doing something in a deviously complex and impractical way.
Other countries developed their own terms for similar funny contraptions:
- United Kingdom: People use the term "Heath Robinson" machines, named after an English illustrator who drew crazy, complex contraptions connected by strings and pulleys.
- Denmark: People call an overly complex invention a Storm P.-machine, named after Danish author and cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen.
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Rube Goldberg Machine Contests
In 1949, engineering students at Purdue University started a friendly competition to see who could build the best Rube Goldberg machine. The competition grew over the decades. In 1989, it became a nationwide contest, adding a division for high school students in 1996.
Today, the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is an international event managed by Rube Goldberg Inc., a non-profit educational foundation started by Rube's son George and led by his granddaughter Jennifer George.
In these competitions, students use principles of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) to build working chain-reaction machines. Every machine must complete a simple everyday task, such as:
- Zipping a zipper
- Popping a balloon
- Watering a small plant
- Turning on a light bulb
- Pouring a bowl of cereal
Machines are judged on creativity, reliability, scientific complexity, and humor. They must contain between 20 and 75 individual energy transfers and steps.
Impact on Movies, Television, and Music
Goldberg's ideas have appeared in countless movies, television series, and music videos:
- Classic Comedy: Goldberg wrote the 1930 comedy movie Soup to Nuts, which starred Ted Healy and featured Goldberg's chain-reaction machines.
- Educational Television: Shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company regularly used Rube Goldberg contraptions to teach letters and numbers.
- Famous Movies: Complicated chain-reaction machines play big roles in films such as Back to the Future (Doc Brown's automated dog feeder), The Goonies (the front-gate opener), Pee-wee's Big Adventure (the breakfast maker), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Home Alone, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Wallace and Gromit.
- Art and Music: In 1987, artists Peter Fischli & David Weiss made a famous 30-minute film called The Way Things Go, showing a continuous indoor chain reaction using tires, fire, and weights. In 2010, the rock band OK Go released a viral music video for their song "This Too Shall Pass," featuring a massive, two-story Rube Goldberg machine that synchronized with the music.
- Science Shows: The Discovery Channel series Unchained Reaction, hosted by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from MythBusters, challenged teams to build giant Rube Goldberg machines based on specific themes.
Board Games and Video Games
Goldberg's concepts are popular in the gaming world:
- Mouse Trap: Introduced in the 1960s, this classic board game has players build a colorful plastic contraption with gears, ramps, diverters, and a falling cage to trap a toy mouse.
- The Incredible Machine: A beloved 1990s puzzle video game series where players connect pulleys, bowling balls, conveyor belts, and lasers to solve physics puzzles.
- Crazy Machines: A modern digital puzzle game inspired by Goldberg's comic blueprints.
- Rube Works: The official licensed Rube Goldberg invention puzzle game released in 2013, letting players solve Professor Butts's classic comic puzzles on computers and tablets.
Why Rube Goldberg Machines Matter in STEM
Building a Rube Goldberg machine is a fun way to explore physics and engineering concepts. These machines demonstrate important scientific principles:
- Conservation of energy: Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it only changes from one form to another (such as potential energy converting into kinetic energy).
- Simple machines: Contraptions use the six classic simple machines—levers, pulleys, inclined planes, wedges, screws, and wheel-and-axles.
- Momentum: Heavy rolling objects pass their moving energy to other items upon impact.
- Problem Solving and Teamwork: Designing a chain reaction teaches students how to test ideas, learn from failures, adjust measurements, and build creative solutions.
See also
In Spanish: Rube Goldberg para niños
- Chindōgu
- Domino effect
- Frederick Rowland Emett
- Jean Tinguely, a Swiss artist who made Rube Goldberg–like sculptures
- PythagoraSwitch
