Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist best known for his zany invention cartoons. He was born in San Francisco on the 4th of July, 1883 – and graduated from U. Cal Berkeley with a degree in engineering. His first job at the San Francisco Chronicle led to early success, but it wasn’t until he moved to NYC and began working for Hearst publications that he became a household name. Rube Goldberg is the only person ever to be listed in the Merriam Webster Dictionary as an adjective. It’s estimated that he did a staggering 50,000 cartoons in his lifetime. For videos about Rube: https://www.rubegoldberg.com/about/.

A Rube Goldberg Machine is “a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to preform a simple operation” (Webster’s New World Dictionary). Humor and a narrative are what separate a Rube Goldberg machine from a chain-reaction machine. Each of Rube’s cartoon’s told a story and his entire goal was to get you to laugh.