mymodernmet.com: Remember the breakfast machine in Peewee's Big Adventure? Or perhaps “The Snoozatron” device in Wallace and Gromit? These wacky inventions—haphazardly built to perform simple tasks—aren’t just designed for movie sets. They’re real, and they're known as Rube Goldberg machines.
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This was a very interesting article to read. While I was familiar with the Rube Goldberg machine itself, I never knew the background and purpose of its creation, being the satirical tool for the advent of the Machine Age. Although some people view them to be silly and useless, Rube Goldberg Machines are more of art exhibitions from my perspective. I once had a physics mini-project to build it, and it took our group an entire week to build one which operated in less than 30 seconds. It actually takes a lot of effort and creativity to invent the device (and sometimes it could even include a story and meaning, just like the Time Machine one in the examples. I think another beauty of it is that it can only be operated once, then you would have to set up the whole machine again. I wonder if there are ways that we could incorporate these into the theater performances. Perhaps inefficient and would require tremendous amount of resources, but it could enhance the special on-site experience for the audience.
I am currently reminiscing about freshman year, when we were supposed to build a huge class-wide Rube Goldberg machine for our Production Planning class, but the process was truncated by Covid. Instead of building a giant machine with dozens of steps, we each built a little Rube Goldberg machine in each of our houses, videotaped it, and then stitched it all into one big video. I am really happy that the article include examples by Joseph's Machines, who is my all time favorite builder of Rube Goldberg machines. I have been referencing and enjoying his videos since at least middle school, which was when I first found out about him. He was shown to me in physics class and I was assigned a project to build a Rube Goldberg machine, much like I was last year. I ended up using a lot of the same principles, which was just things rolling down tracks and bumping into other things that bumped into more things.
I love Rube Goldberg Machines. They are very interesting to me and always make me laugh. My high school sent one to a local competition eery year and, although I never participated, the process of watching it get built over time in the science room always was fun and interesting to watch. The machines in the article are such a mix on ingenious engineering, and also just a good time. For instance the one created by the students at Perdue University that went through all of the stages of world history in an incredible 244 steps is truly and engineering feat. The final step of the machine being to water a plant however, is simply amusing to me. All of that work and time and effort for the simple task of watering a plant in just under two minutes is rather funny to me and seems like the designers probably had a good time making it too. Or at least coming up with the idea, I'm sure that the build was extremely frustrating.
I think the first time I saw a Rube Goldberg machine was in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when I was maybe 2 or 3 years old? And I'm not gonna lie, I think that may have had a very strong impact on where I ended up in life. I've always been super fascinated with building things and also the absurd and why the hell not kind of projects. Which looking back I now think probably stems from that. When I think of Rube now, it's mainly the disappointment of not getting to fully work on Rube freshman year. The excitement of planning and setting out to create something like that and then not getting to see it through to actualization was saddening. Some of the videos on this article were actually reference videos we watched for Rube. In particular, Ok Go is one we took a lot of our simpler mechanical sequence ideas for. They use a lot of levels and varying objects and movements to make it visually stimulating and different. The idea that the Purdue machine took them 2500 hours is astounding.
There was a project my friends had to do back in high school physics, where they had to create a Rube Goldberg machine, and that was the only reason I wanted to take that class. They seem so tedious to make but it must be so gratifying when it actually works. The self-operating-napkin, made by Goldberg himself, is most definitely a joke experiment that led into real science. The little details like the test subject name being “Professor Butts,” the live toucan, and the rocket launch surely exhibit the fact that his inventions were ironic. I feel like making fun of science (and making science fun in the process) is a necessary part of learning. Bringing entertainment and amusement into science was something that he did, and there was a Rube Goldberg machine at a Science Museum near me growing up. I feel like that embodies the satirical nature Goldberg wanted in his machines.
I have always loved dominoes and other chain reaction toys ever since i was a child. I had dreamt of getting the board game mouse trap, where your objective is to capture a mouse using a Rube Goldberg machine. This is a really insightful read, especially as a first year dp, since I have heard that we are going to have to create our own Rube Goldberg machines later on in the year. After reading this article, I realize I had no idea on the origin of the these devices. The rube Goldberg machines were named after the American cartoonist who created these elaborate machines in cartoon form, and were meant to be really silly or satirical. It is interesting that when they first came out, people thought that it performs a very basic job in a confusing and overly complicated way. I think the context has changed almost 100 years later, because when I see an extremely complicated and complex Rube Goldberg machine I do not think that it is ridiculous or silly. I am actually extremely impressed with the craftmanship.
Who doesn’t love a good Rube Goldberg machine? Besides, probably, the undergrads who are a bit traumatized by them. They’re just wonderful and such an excellent teaching tools for younger people. You can cover Newtonian physics, design by iteration, causality, product design, and probably other things that I can’t think of. Rube Goldberg machines can be as complex or as simple as the user wants, which in an educational setting, really lets the instructor set up what concept they want the designer to learn. A simple domino lineup can be a Rube Goldberg machine, if the objective is just to learn cause and effect. You can add some ramps and springs and teach kinematics. I made a really bad Rube Goldberg for science class, and while it didn’t work, it definitely solidified my appreciate for technical design and really pushed me to want to be an engineer. Plus, they are just really fun to look at.
I love Rube Goldberg machines so much. There is something so freeing about creating something for the process as opposed to the final product. I am always so stuck in the mindset of “creating because someone told me to” and almost never because inspiration naturally struck. I am always so product oriented that I rarely ever find myself stopping to smell the roses and enjoying the things I love to do. Seeing people still making these pointless machines to this day is so inspiring. Obviously the art and engineering behind them is impressive. But for me, the most beautiful part is that there is an audience for them. Even after seeing hundreds of Rube Goldbergs, I am still fascinated by these needlessly complex, roundabout, inefficient, pointless machines. It proves that sometimes the process is more fulfilling than the outcome and that sometimes, we are all just looking for a little pointless fun.
This article talks about specific examples of Rube Goldberg machines. I really wish that I would have read this article sooner. After just creating our own machine it's really interesting comparing my experience with the ones that are in this article. The Self-Operating Napkin is possibly one of Rube Goldberg's most notable inventions, as it is one of his popular comics. There are a lot of very original examples in this like when I had never seen before by Purdue University. This was a very complex machine that I could not imagine having to recreate. 2,500 hours went into this machine. It felt like that for the machine that we did, which was only 71 steps. However, I will say that it only completed one flawless run.. making me feel a lot better about ours. I also read that the largest Rube Goldberg machine was 412 steps. I could not imagine making a machine that big after my experience last week. Glad that's over!
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