1 October 2021
An early Rube Goldberg “invention,” from 18 December 1913. “How to Open a Bottle of Beer Without an Opener.” A man holds a lighted candle under a string, causing it to break, releasing a ball that rolls through a trough, striking a hammer, which triggers a pistol, and so on through several more absurd steps, until a phonograph plays a record of a woman’s voice, and the “bottle of beer, being polite, takes off its hat.”
A Rube Goldberg device is an ingenious, overly complicated, and entirely impractical one. Reuben “Rube” Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970) was an American humorist and cartoonist famed for drawing schematics of absurdly complicated machines to perform everyday tasks. Goldberg began as a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Bulletin in 1907, and his 1908 comic strip Foolish Questions catapulted him to national celebrity in the United States. While remembered today chiefly for his cartoons, he was also a screenwriter (he wrote the Three Stooge’s first feature film, Soup to Nuts (1930)), animated filmmaker, and popular on the lecture circuit.
The adjective Goldbergian was used by humorist Robert Benchley in an August 1915 piece for the magazine Vanity Fair. But Benchley wasn’t referring to Goldberg’s machines in particular, but rather more generally to his style of verbal wit:
But hay-fever cures always come secondhand—by hearsay. Some one snuggles up to you and says “Oh, do you have hay-fever?” (to which the Goldbergian answer would be “No, I paint my nose and eyes red every day to frighten the gypsy-moths away”).
By 1920 we see the phrase Rube Goldberg type applied to academics who overly complicate things. From a tongue-in-cheek article in the 11 April 1920 Fort Worth Star-Telegram about a man who thinks he has discovered evidence of rubber tires from four million years ago:
They’re all wrong.
Nobby-headed historians and archaeologists of the Rube Goldberg type who have written weighty tomes about life, customs and handicraft of the paleolithic and neolithic ages must have been fakers.
Vehicles in the Chellean age traveled on rubber tires produced by our ancestors 4,000,000 years ago.
Yep—that’s the belief expressed by F.H. Daniels of Mena, Arkansas, in a letter to the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.
And by 1928 we get Rube Goldberg as a term referring to device like those depicted in Goldberg’s cartoons. From a review of a stage show in the New York Times, 10 February 1928:
Eager to give the customers a fair return on their money, he then introduces the Fuller Construction Orchestra, which is one of those Rube Goldberg crazy mechanical elaborations for passing a modest musical impulse from a buzz saw to a soda-water siphon, on to a ferris wheel contraption, up and around, down, bang on the head of a fool triangle player, and out. Or something like that.
Goldberg died over fifty years ago, but his legacy lives on.
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Sources:
Atkinson, J. Brooks. “The Play: ‘Rain or Shine,’ Joe Cook.” New York Times, 10 February 1928, 26. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Benchley, Robert C. “A General Survey of Art—and Hay Fever.” Vanity Fair, 4.6, August 1915, 53. EBSCOhost Vanity Fair Magazine Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2011, modified March 2019, s.v. Rube Goldberg, n.
“Rubber Tire Only Rediscovery Thinks Arkansas Man When He Finds Ancient Tread Marks.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Texas), 11 April 1920, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Image credit: Goldberg, R.L., 1913. Public domain image.