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"Rube Goldberg" is an expression used to describe an amusingly constructed but unnecessarily complex contraption. For example, a slinky goes down a flight of stairs and activates a fan, which blows a paper airplane, which sets off a string of dominoes that end up turning on a light switch. Something like that. A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, sculptor, and author named (you guessed it) Rube Goldberg came up with the concept. We learned all about him at his official site. Trained as an engineer at U.C. Berkeley, Goldberg eventually found work as a cartoonist for a San Francisco paper. As his
career took off, he moved to New York where he drew for the Evening Mail newspaper. Goldberg's most popular cartoons were, of course, his impractical but entertaining inventions. They continue to appeal and amuse because, as Goldberg himself said, they stood as "symbols of man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results." Though Goldberg died in 1970, his legacy lives on. Yahoo! Video features a ton of footage detailing user-created Rube Goldberg-like devices, and the Argonne National Laboratory hosts an annual contest for high school students.
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