The Retro Blog

Rube Goldberg is rare among cartoonists in that just about everybody knows his name. Rube Goldberg machines are a complicated series of contraptions that work together to perform an exceedingly simple task. The idea is so popular that “Rube Goldberg Machine” has its own entry in Webster’s dictionary.

Rube Goldberg loved drawing from a young age, but his parents steered him away from it. Goldberg earned a degree in engineering from UC Berkeley, leading me to wish he had actually manufactured his creative contraptions. Goldberg only lasted a month at his first engineering gig before getting a bunch of cartooning gigs at various San Francisco newspapers. He started drawing his famed machines in 1914, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1948.

In 1930 Goldberg wrote the film Soup to Nuts, the very first Three Stooges film. It’s up on youtube.

Here’s a 1940 film called “Something for Nothing” in which Rube explains and animates why perpetual motion machines just don’t work. You really need fuel. In fact, this educational video is really just a front for Chevrolet. They wanted to make sure everybody knew about gasoline, “the virtually unlimited source of power.”