Inspiration
Rube Goldberg & His Imagination-Trigerring Cartoons Are Still Relevant To Contemporary Kids
A journey of becoming the grind’s favourite verb.
You know you have made a great impact when your name becomes a brand and even better – a verb. Rube Goldberg, the famous American cartoonist, has had that impact on the science-art world. Wearing many hats of a sculptor, author, engineer, inventor, Goldberg is best known for his popular machine-cartoon, sometimes political satire. His work won him Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in 1948 and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award in 1959.
His cartoons linked art with science. He made machinery function look simple through his cartoons and depicted complicated gadgets performing simple tasks. He decoded the complexities of the machine and made it look fun and games in his cartoon. The popularity of his cartoons led to the expression “Rube Goldberg machines” in movies, by common people, by everyone to describe similar gadgets and processes.
So, maybe, during this unprecedented time, you (educators) can pick one session dedicated to Mr Goldberg and his machines. A recent biography of him, named ‘Just Like Rube Goldberg: The Incredible True Story of the Man Behind the Machines’ uses the same mannerism as Mr Goldberg’s to tell his journey. The book uses a cartoon-like graphic representation of his life and his passion for machines. This biography by Sarah Aronson is written to encourage young artists and inventors to pursue their passions.
The book follows his journey from working at a low-level job to making cartoons that triggered imagination to his machines. His legacy is the contraception of the word Rube Goldberg Machine, which simply means to design machines that assemble simple unrelated devices to perform simple tasks in indirect convoluted ways.
You can also revisit movies that used his machinery ideas like the front gate mechanism in The Goonies and the breakfast machine shown in Pee-wee's Big Adventure.