The World Of Rube Goldberg

Forget Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Alexander Graham Bell. The contributions of George Washington Carver, Eli Whitney, Henry Ford, Nicola Tesla, Leonardo da Vinci – well, maybe not him – pale in comparison. The most creative inventive genius of all time was arguably a Jewish-American cartoonist who invented a more efficient way to get sand out of your shoes after a day at the beach; devised a contraption that helps a late commuter catch his train; created a mosquito exterminator; came up with the idea for a brilliant and simple way to affix a postage stamp on an envelope; designed a device for closing the window if it starts to rain while you are away; created an automatic babysitter that keeps a baby happy while you are out at the movies; originated a simplified can opener; concocted a clever mechanism to slice bread for a picnic sandwich; conceived a system for turning up the heat before you wake up in the morning; devised an automatic sheet music turner for performing musicians; dreamed up a “self-watering plant”: created a painless tooth-pulling device; designed a tool for making it easy to find a lost golf ball; conceived a sun-blocking device for the beach – and this list only skims the surface of the inventions for which he is credited.

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These innovations all came out of the head of cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor Reuben Garrett Lucius (“Rube”) Goldberg (1883-1970), who is best known for his popular cartoons depicting complicated multistage machines that integrate animate and inanimate objects to carry out simple everyday tasks in indirect, convoluted, and highly-entertaining ways. The cartoons led to the expression “Rube Goldberg machines” to describe a chain-reaction type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an outlandishly and unnecessarily complicated way. These machines usually consist of a series of simple and unrelated devices where the action of each triggers the initiation of the next in a chain reaction that eventually results in achieving a stated goal. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966) defines “Rube Goldberg machine” as “having a fantastically complicated improvised appearance” or “deviously complex and impractical.”

Goldberg’s machines often included the likes of midgets, acrobatic monkeys, dancing mice, chattering false teeth, electric eels, whirling dervishes, and other incongruous elements. Some critics make the case that there are strong structural similarities between Goldberg’s drawings and such stories such as the Wise Men of Chelm, who are notorious in literature for engaging in tortuous Talmudic argument that only serves to complicate that which is essentially straightforward.

Goldberg’s schematic drawings of comical “inventions” were largely influenced by the evolving complexity of the machine age and the need to adapt quickly to new technology and mechanisms. His artwork lampooned this evolving technology, providing a unique – and absurd – take on the complexities of modern life, while simultaneously satirizing and promoting the infinite ingenuity and limited spiritedness of man, an approach that was of particular appeal to the many who missed a simpler age and yearned for pre-technological revolutionary times.

Famous cartoonist Art Spiegelman, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, once commented that “Rube Goldberg knew how to get from A to B using all the letters in the alphabet.” Only Goldberg, universally recognized as one of the most famous and beloved cartoonists in history, has enriched our linguistic heritage through the donation of his own name: Webster’s New World Dictionary defines “Rube Goldberg” as “a comically involved, complicated invention laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation.” If there is a single theme that underscores all his concoctions it is that alleged labor-saving devices are often more trouble than they are worth.

U.S. stamp: Goldberg’s “self-wiping napkin” (1995).

By the time of his death in 1970 at age 87, such contrived mechanisms made Goldberg synonymous with cartooning and, in 1995, his Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931) was honored with a U.S. postage stamp (see exhibit). Characteristic of his work, it begins with a soup spoon (A) raised to mouth, pulling a string (B) and thereby jerking a ladle (C), which throws a cracker (D) past a toucan (E), who jumps after cracker, which tilts the perch, (F) upsetting seeds (G) into a pail (H). The extra weight in the pail pulls a cord (I), which opens and ignites a lighter (J), setting off a skyrocket (K), which causes a sickle (L) to cut a string (M), allowing a pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin. (Whew!)

What makes Goldberg’s inventions comical is their very absurdity and, although he was trained as an engineer, he never cared if they actually worked, so long as readers found them entertaining. His contrivances are still celebrated by science and engineering professionals, as well as by comic artists and intellectuals, with many countries and institutions hosting Goldberg competitions, including the annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, established in 1987.

Rare original Goldberg signed drawing inscribed “With best love from Professor Butts.” Butts is depicted doffing his hat to “Miss Plotz” (Yiddish humor; “plotz” means to “collapse” or “faint”) using a string and hat invention.

In Israel, the Technion in Haifa holds an annual Rube Goldberg machine contest for international high school students, which began in 2005 when Technion students built a Rube Goldberg Machine to light the Chanukah menorah. (As to whether this constitutes a kosher lighting, see your local rav.) This highly popular event led to hundreds of imaginative creations from high school students across the world, including the design of a Rube Goldberg Machine for Passover, in which the story of Pesach is told using pulleys, dominoes, weights, kiddush cups, and matzah, all rigged into an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine.

The cartoon leading to Goldberg’s eternal fame featured a screwball inventor named Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, A.K., which had its origins in his recall of the “Barodik,” an incredibly complex apparatus for determining the mass of the earth conceived by his analytical mechanics instructor. While it is not known what “A.K.” stood for, some commentators speculate that it might be short for “All Knowing” but, knowing how often Goldberg drew on Jewish humor, I suggest that it might stand for “Alter Kocker” (unfortunately, I have not found a single source to support my theory).

Goldberg’s first “Professor Butts” invention cartoon: Automatic Weight Reducing Machine.

All of Goldberg’s “invention” cartoons feature the eminent Professor Butts, including his very first of the series, the convoluted and highly improbable Automatic Weight-Reducing Machine for the Evening Mail (see exhibit): Doughnut (A) rolls down board (B) and becomes overheated from the friction – hot doughnut falls on lump of wax (C), melting it and parting rope (D) releasing fat man (E) who falls on bomb (F) – bomb explodes, blowing man through loop (G) suspended from balloon (H) – balloon moves in horizontal direction and bumps into pin (I) which punctures it, dropping subject on red-hot stove (J) – he naturally rises hurriedly to table (L) and falls into hole (K) – he hits lever (M), bringing bell (N) down tightly over his body – he cannot pass through the hole and cannot call for help because bell is sound-proof – so he remains without food until his body is sufficiently thin to pass through the hole.

Although he drew an estimated 50,000 cartoons in his life, relatively few of them were related to the eponymous machines for which he remains best known. He created numerous other cartoon series, including Foolish Questions, where a person posing an obvious question is given a droll and deeply sarcastic answer. Goldberg said that he got the idea from an Evening Mail colleague, who was ruminating one day about the silly questions people ask. For example, you meet a fellow who’s been out of town and say to him, “Hello, are you back again?” (“No, I’m still away.”) A man mowing his lawn in the scorching heat is asked by a passerby, “Are you cutting the grass?” (“No, I love the smell of burning fumes in the 100 degree heat.”)

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As Goldberg tells the story, on October 1, 1908, he was drawing a man who had fallen out of the window of the fifty-story Flatiron Building; when a female passerby inquiring sympathetically “Are you hurt?” The man replies “No, I am taking my beauty sleep.” This cartoon became “Foolish Question Number 1,” and, over the next 18 months, Goldberg drew 450 Foolish Questions and punch lines, ranging from “Oh, look, is that a snake?” (“No, it’s a lost shoelace looking for a home”) to “Is that a folding bed?” (“No, it’s a box for my new harmonica”) to “Did you cut yourself?” (“No, I fell asleep on a buzz saw.”)

Following these was another series called I’m the Guy, as in, “I’m the guy who put the hobo in Hoboken;” “I’m the guy who put the sand in sandwich;” and “I’m the guy who put the pep in pepper.” The phrase went as viral as possible in those pre-radio days; it appeared on pins and cigarette premiums, popped up in ads, and even inspired a hit song, “I’m the Guy,” with lyrics by Goldberg and music by Bert Grant.

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In the September 29, 1907 issue of the San Francisco Bulletin, where he was working as a sports editor at the time, Goldberg introduced Mike and Ike (“They Look Alike”) as incredibly (and hysterically) dumb, yet imaginative, twin morons, one of whom played the straight man while the other was the gag man, much in the style of comedic duos at the time, like Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello.

Through his characteristic humor, Goldberg sought to promote tolerance of Jewish and Irish immigrants and convince readers that they were part of the great melting pot known as America. Mike and Ike would offer painful puns on standard phrases: for example, asked by Mike to use the word “icing” in a sentence, Ike responds “Sweet land of liberty, of thee icing (I sing).”

In 1918, Goldberg launched Boob McNutt, a cartoon about a clumsy, oafish fellow who, although he is quite friendly and always seeks to be helpful to one and all, his rank incompetence invariably results in failure and destruction. The strip began as a series of jokes which usually ended with Boob meeting death due to his innocently destructive ways, but soon Goldberg introduced a love interest, Pearl, and the theme of the strip turned to Boob’s efforts to win her hand in marriage. (They were married in 1926, but were divorced soon after, and several cycles of courtship, marriage, and divorce ensued.) For a time, Mike and Ike were brought into the strip as supporting characters, Boob’s uncles, but Goldberg ran out of interest and Boob McNutt ended in 1934.

Original newspaper photo of Goldberg presenting his sculpture of Richard Nixon to the president.

Throughout this time, Goldberg also branched out into other artistic fields that helped him to achieve even greater fame and success, including drawing advertising art that pitched products from gasoline to cigarettes. A true “Renaissance man” of his time, he also worked in vaudeville, live action and animated film, prose, poetry, songwriting, radio, television, political cartooning, and (at the end of his life) sculpture. He created some 300 bronze objects, which generated great demand among art collectors, and his sculpted works have been displayed at the National Museum of American History. (See exhibit of Nixon sculpture.)

Goldberg worked on seventy animated films and, though he never intended any of his silly machines to be built, he made a conspicuous exception in scripting Soup to Nuts, the first Three Stooges short (1930), in which his main character is an inventor who builds laughable thingamajigs, several of which were constructed as comic props. (Goldberg made a cameo appearance in the film as himself, opening letters in a restaurant.) His animation work was of such high quality that many commentators argue that had he fully dedicated himself to animation production, he would have been another Walt Disney.

In 1948, he hosted a television program on WPIX just two weeks after the New York station began broadcasting. All of this made him a celebrity who befriended fellow Jewish-American stars like Houdini, Groucho Marx and the Gershwin brothers, as well as famous non-Jews, including Charlie Chaplin – for whom he designed several “Goldberg” inventions and whose still-beloved assembly-line lunacies in Modern Times almost certainly sprung from the head of Goldberg’s Professor Butts.

Dr. Seuss acknowledged his colleague’s influence in a cartoon he signed “Rube Goldbrick”; Al Jaffe admitted that his concept for his Mad Magazine regular feature, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, was lifted from Goldberg’s Foolish Questions; and many of the Acme Corporation contraptions that Wile E. Coyote built in a futile attempt to finally catch the Road Runner had their genesis in Goldberg machines. In 1963, the Ideal Toy Company introduced Mousetrap, a board game in which players cooperate to construct a three-dimensional Rube Goldberg machine and then compete to use it to catch each other’s mouse-shaped game pieces. (Mousetrap’s creator, Marvin Glass, was a Jewish toy designer who readily admitted that he was inspired by Goldberg machines but never paid him any royalties.)

Goldberg became the nation’s first millionaire cartoonist – earning the equivalent of $2 million in 1915, an unimaginable sum for a cartoonist at the time. A leading factor in his financial success was his determination not to sell the rights and characters to publishing companies, which is what every other cartoonist at the time was expected to do, but, rather, to only license his work for publication or syndication, retaining full ownership rights.

Goldberg’s Jewish journey, much as his art, was unconventional. Born in San Francisco the third of seven children, his father, Max, had immigrated from Germany to California, where he worked as a bank appraiser, political operative, real estate mogul, and served as sheriff of San Francisco County and as fire commissioner. These were not the types of positions for a Jewish immigrant to hold in the western United States in the late nineteenth century, although 1890s San Francisco had the second largest Jewish population in the United States (New York was first), but Max was a “macher.” Some historians argue that Goldberg’s exposure to his father’s political contacts played an important part in his later work as a political cartoonists lampooning political leaders and business big shots.

Max enrolled the young Rube in the city’s elite public high school, which was heavily Jewish but, like much of the San Francisco German Jewish community at the time, Max was a “High Holiday Jew” whose Friday nights were set aside for his weekly poker game. He generally rejected religious practice and observance, and the absence of any traditional religious “baggage” is said to have made Rube a free spirit. As such, it is no surprise that Rube lived his life as a secular Jew, even marrying his (Jewish) wife, Irma Seeman – daughter and heiress of S. W. Seeman, owner of the burgeoning White Rose Tea and Grocery Company – in a civil ceremony. Nonetheless, he rejected constant pressure from his colleagues to change his name from the all-too-Jewish “Goldberg.” In an interview in American Magazine (1922), he said

…[I]t was idiotic to even consider such a thing; that I would be ashamed of it all the remainder of my life; and that, if a man’s achievements are no bigger than the sound of his name, it doesn’t much matter what his name may be.

Peace Today, Goldberg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoon published in the July 22, 1947 New York Sun.

Suddenly, in 1938 and out of proverbial left field, Goldberg turned to serious political cartooning and his colleagues and fans were incredulous when it was announced that the New York Sun had signed him to serve as the paper’s editorial cartoonist. As a Jew, he was strongly anti-totalitarian and many of his drawings reflected anti-Nazi and anti-Stalin themes. In 1948, he won the Pulitzer Prize for “Peace Today,” depicting a little house and yard, a grill, an outdoor umbrella, and a dog, all the trappings of a typical suburban family, all balanced atop an atomic bomb dangling over an abyss labeled “world destruction.” In another cartoon, Meeting Point (1947), Goldberg depicts a Jew and an Arab walking in parallel desert paths under dark swirling clouds that lead all the way to the far horizon, with the caption “When will they find a meeting point?”

Meeting Point, Goldberg’s cartoon about Middle East Peace.

Even though he was familiar with antisemitism, having grown up with his immigrant parents’ stories of European antisemitism, Goldberg grew increasingly alarmed when the Jew-hatred became personal when he began to receive sickening antisemitic hate mail – and packages including human feces – particularly when news of the Holocaust began to spread and the threats extended to his family. Although he continued his refusal to change his own name, as discussed above, he sought to protect his two sons, Thomas and George, by having them change their surname. Interestingly, at around this time, Goldberg, when asked to review and comment on some drawings by Lew Sayre Schwartz, advised the budding cartoonist that “you’ve got a lot of talent, kid, but change your name.”

Goldberg was a co-founder and president of the American National Cartoonists Society, and the Smithsonian Institute displayed a retrospective exhibition of his life’s work, making Goldberg the first cartoonist to ever be so honored. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Peace Today that he won, Goldberg also won the National Cartoonist Society Gold T-Square Award (1955) and their Reuben Award (1969).