Steaming with STEM: Celebrating Teen Tech Week
Rube Goldberg Machine
Old Tech
A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion, generally including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg.
Try playing this life size game of
Mousetrap!
What Is A Rube Goldberg Machine? By William DeLong
Published February 15, 2018
An elaborate combination of a coffee cup, dropping weights, rolling balls, combustion, electrical appliances, gravity and even a pet gerbil combine to turn the page on Herscher’s paper in about two minutes. Rather than do things the normal way, the artist decided to build an awesome machine that takes basic physics to an entirely different level that would make his high school physics teacher proud. A Rube Goldberg machine relies on a series of chain reactions that perform complicated feats to perform a simple task. Chances are good that you’ve seen a Rube Goldberg machine in action when you were a kid. If you ever played the board game Mousetrap, you know exactly how these chain reactions work to win the game. Did you ever construct dominoes side-by-side and then knock them over? That’s another version of a Rube Goldberg machine.
Rube Goldberg was an actual person. He was born Reuben Lucius Goldberg in San Francisco on July 4, 1883. He loved art as a teenager, but the young man attended the University of California at Berkeley, at his father’s urging, where he earned a degree in mining engineering. Working in mines takes a lot of engineering prowess. His first post-graduate job was to map out sewer and water lines in San Francisco. Think of that video you just watched about Riga’s tree lighting. There seemed to be a lot of pipes involved in that design. Goldberg gave up on mining and starting drawing cartoons for local papers, including the San Francisco Chronicle. His artistic eye landed him a job with the Evening Mail in New York. Goldberg’s wit, intelligence, and art skills led him to a full-time career. His specialty was drawing new inventions that solved simple problems in complicated ways. He drew convoluted chain reactions that performed seemingly easy tasks. The public loved Goldberg’s work. His drawings expanded to hundreds of papers across the United States in syndication. The artist even penned a movie in 1931 called Soup to Nuts. That film was the first appearance of the iconic trio known as Three Stooges. Some of his illustrations even ended up in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Before he died in 1970, Goldberg drew more than 50,000 cartoons over his lifetime.
Design Challenge: Build a Rube Goldberg device that uses at least three out of six simple machines sequentially. The six simple machines Lever, Wheel and axle,
Pulley, Inclined plane, Wedge, Screw.
Constraints
- Machine must include at least 3 simple machines
- Machine must last at least 3 seconds
- Machine must have at least 5 steps
- Machine must be freestanding
- Machine can’t be larger than 3 feet by 3 feet.
- Marbles must roll without stopping or dropping of the machine
