Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, have you ever seen a Rube Goldberg contraption?
Speaker 1: There gizmos that perform a simple task in a ridiculously
Speaker 1: complicated manner. For example, want to know how to get
Speaker 1: rid of a mouse? Simple? There's a mouse trap that
Speaker 1: lures the mouse with a painting of a piece of cheese.
Speaker 1: It causes the mouse to step on a hot stove,
Speaker 1: jump to an escalator, fall on a boxing glove, and
Speaker 1: get knocked into a rocket that sends him to the moon.
Speaker 1: What could be easier? The mouse trap was one of
Speaker 1: many cartoons by Ruben Goldberg, a rock star cartoonist of
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds. According to Renny Prittican, chief curator
Speaker 1: at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Goldberg drew
Speaker 1: thousands of cartoons of wacky inventions that were syndicated in
Speaker 1: newspapers all over the United States. His name became synonymous
Speaker 1: with entertainingly absurd machinery that complicates simple tasks. The Miriam
Speaker 1: Webster Dictionary included the term Rube Goldberg, making Goldberg the
Speaker 1: only person whose name is listed as an adjective in
Speaker 1: the dictionary. According to Smithsonian dot com, Goldberg, who was
Speaker 1: born in San Francisco in eighteen eighty three, was originally
Speaker 1: an engineer. He graduated from the College of Mining Engineering
Speaker 1: at the University of California at Berkeley in nineteen o four.
Speaker 1: For six months he mapped water and sewer lines for
Speaker 1: San Francisco until he could stand it no longer. He
Speaker 1: then took a lower paying job cartooning at the San
Speaker 1: Francisco Chronicle. His granddaughter, Jennifer George, says what he cared
Speaker 1: about most was if he made you laugh. Book The
Speaker 1: Art of Rube Goldberg describes his extensive output of cartoons, writing,
Speaker 1: and even sculpture up until his death in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Goldberg left San Francisco for New York in nineteen o
Speaker 1: seven and was hired by the New York Evening Mail.
Speaker 1: One of his early cartoons for the newspapers showed an
Speaker 1: injured man who had fallen from a fifty story building
Speaker 1: and a woman asking are you hurt? The man replies, no,
Speaker 1: I am taking my beauty sleep. It was a hit,
Speaker 1: and over the next two years he drew four hundred
Speaker 1: and forty nine more in the Foolish Questions series, readers
Speaker 1: loved sending in suggestions. He also created a series called
Speaker 1: I'm the Guy. It featured statements such as I'm the
Speaker 1: guy who put Hobo and hoboken and I'm the guy
Speaker 1: who puts sand in the sandwich, starting a national fad.
Speaker 1: Goldberg's invention drawings began in nineteen twelve and made him
Speaker 1: into a household name. According to an exhibit at the
Speaker 1: Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the first was the
Speaker 1: simple mosquito exterminator. Here's what's going on. A mosquito looking
Speaker 1: to bite. A sleeping man enters a window. A walks
Speaker 1: along a board baited by small pieces of steak, but
Speaker 1: then falls unconscious because of chloroform fumes from a sponge
Speaker 1: B and falls onto a spring loaded platform see it.
Speaker 1: Then wakes up, looks through the telescope D to see
Speaker 1: the reflection of the sleeper's bald head and a mirror E,
Speaker 1: which it mistakes for the moon outside the window, and
Speaker 1: this jumps off that spring loaded platform through the empty
Speaker 1: telescope see through D and hits the mirror, then falling
Speaker 1: into a trash can. F for the next twenty years,
Speaker 1: Goldberg provided a new cartoon invention about every two weeks.
Speaker 1: He continued on a less frequent basis. Util nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: he invented the character Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, who created
Speaker 1: machines to open screen doors, shine shoes, and find soap
Speaker 1: dropped from the bathtub. According to the art of Rube Goldberg,
Speaker 1: this character was inspired by two professors that Goldberg found
Speaker 1: particularly boring at the College of Mining Engineering, Samuel B. Christie,
Speaker 1: who lectured at length on time and motion efficiency, and
Speaker 1: Frederick Slate, who once showed students the bear Dick, a
Speaker 1: convoluted machine meant to measure the weight of the earth.
Speaker 1: Adam Gopnik wrote in his introduction to the book that
Speaker 1: the Invention cartoons mocked the elaborate world of machinery by
Speaker 1: mocking the larger idea of efficiency. Gopnick wrote that Goldberg
Speaker 1: had a poetic intuition common to all great cartoonists. Goldberg
Speaker 1: was an early voice questioning the use to which technology
Speaker 1: is put and the benefits of supposed labor saving devices.
Speaker 1: Instead of simplifying life, they complicated. Predicans says The theme
Speaker 1: is pertinent today because in the rush to create and
Speaker 1: sell new technology. Predicans said, we are ignoring a public conversation.
Speaker 1: Is this good for us or not? In nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: Goldberg started drawing political cartoons. In them, he began to
Speaker 1: comment on the rise of fascism. Predictions said he got
Speaker 1: a lot of criticism for it, including threats to himself
Speaker 1: and his family. Among his famous political cartoons was a
Speaker 1: scene in a Middle Eastern desert, two figures trudge along
Speaker 1: to parallel paths that never meet. One figure is labeled
Speaker 1: Arab and the other jew. In seven cartoon shows a
Speaker 1: small house balanced on an enormous nuclear missile balanced on
Speaker 1: a precipice. The title is piece today this cartoon want
Speaker 1: to pull its surprise Preddicans said he had a huge
Speaker 1: impact on his time Culturally, cartoonists were immensely popular. They
Speaker 1: were really cultural heroes and Rube Goldberg devices live on
Speaker 1: today in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, which pits school
Speaker 1: kids against each other in an effort to design and
Speaker 1: build wacky machinery. You can google some of their efforts
Speaker 1: and check them out on YouTube. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Stell Simonton and produced by Tyler Klang for more
Speaker 1: on this and lots of other historical topics, visit our
Speaker 1: home planet as stuffworks dot com.