Stuff You Should KnowEveryone knows what a Rube Goldberg machine is, but what do you know about the cartoonist who they're named after?
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, There's Chuck. Jerry's here too, Dave Saran Sperre. Let's get going.
Big thanks to stell simonton great name one of the great house Stuffworks dot com writers. And I am really thrilled with this one because I had always known about and heard the term and fully understood what Rube Goldberg meant. A Rube Goldberg machine is something that is really complex and kind of awesome, and it's usually some kind of crazy contraption that ends up doing something very very simply in a way that's far too complicated than it needs to be, right. And I know that because it's a very common term. It's been around since in the dictionary actually since nineteen thirty one. But I never, until like yesterday, knew that Rube Goldberg was like a dude and he was a cartoonist and that's where it came from. He drew cartoons about these machines.
It was very popular for it.
Yeah, for sure, I guess I knew that already, and I'm not sure, yeah I did. I think one of the things my first introduction to Rube Goldberg was that game mouse Trap.
Remember that of course I have one, and we have one in Ruby's room.
Okay, there you go. So that was directly lifted in some ways from Rube Goldberg cartoons. And that must have been where like the springboard for me, that going into me in a bathtub, that went down a pole and dropped me off in a fountain of molasses.
Yeah, he had a mouse trap cartoon. It wasn't what they did in the game, but clearly inspired by that kind of thing. He did like fifty thousand cartoons. When I look at his stuff, I'm sure you looked at a ton of these cartoons. I really like the actual contraption stuff, not so much to the others, but he it reminds it was not unlike r Crumb in style for sure. And I went and looked it up, and apparently Rube Goldberg is one of quite a few artists that inspired arkrum So it made sense.
Oh okay, good catch man.
Yeah, it's sort of Arkrummy.
One of the other little interesting tibits about Rube Goldberg to get started is his name is the only name listed as an adjective in Merriam Webster Dictionary. Yeah, and there are other names listed, but they're altered like Machiavellian. This is just Rube Goldberg is an adjective to describe something that is unnecessarily complicated.
Well, your name is the only name that is in the dictionary as a verb.
That's true.
Got to clark somebody.
Something Clark me that mousetrap born ging amazing.
I didn't even think about that. You and Rube.
Goldberg, yep, pals forever?
All right?
So Rube Goldberg was born Ruben Garrett Lucius Goldberg kincaid, great name, born on the fourth of July in eighteen eighty three in San Francisco. And this all makes sense. He was an engineer. He went to school at cal Berkeley and got an engineering degree, So you know, it sort of makes sense that all these sort of contraptions he drew in these cartoons came from an engineer's brain.
Yeah, I guess he was a cartoonist at heart, at the very least. His granddaughter who wrote a book about him. Her name was Jennifer or is Jennifer George. Her book is the Art of Rube Goldberg. And she said that what he cared most about was if he made you laugh. And there's not that much room to do that as a mining engineer, right, So he spent about six months after he got his degree he graduated, he spent six months mapping water and sewer lines and he said, this is this is not the job for me, and he quit. It was a pretty well paying job and decamped to New York, where he took a much lower paying job at the New York Evening Mail as a cartoonist because that's what he wanted to do, so he decided to do it. He was that kind of guy.
You know what else he did that kind of knocked me out. What In the book, his granddaughter talked about the fact that he was a writer. He was a sculptor later in life. But he wrote a three Stooges movie.
Oh yeah, that's right before they were well known, and they were Ted Healy and his Stooges.
It was pre uh, I'm gonna say the wrong stooge.
I can't remember.
Curly pre Shemp might have been pre Curly. The original three was Curly Mow.
And Larry Okay, I think it was, and then Shep.
Came after Curly, and then you had Curly Joe, and then you had Joe Besser and then you had, like the Harlem Globetrotters and Scooba View for some.
Reason, Dare we do one on the Three Stooges at some point?
That'd be fun definitely.
Anyway, He wrote the Three Stooges movie Soup to Nuts, but ended up, like you said, being a cartoonist and first got his fame drawing a cartoon that was of the time. It's not so funny now, but they were called foolish Questions. I did close to five hundred of these, and one example was it would be a guy that had just fallen from a tall building on the ground and a lady comes up and says, are you hurt? And he says, no, I'm taking my beauty sleep.
So does it translate?
Is like the funniest thing these days, but it really does just gangbusters in the early nineteen hundreds of Yeah.
That was one thing he had a knack for was creating national fads. So people from around the country send in suggestions for foolish questions, and he wrote I think he drew five hundred of them. Did you say they're four hundred.
And fifty yeah, close to it.
So that was just a kind of like a trait of his career. He was a nationally syndicated cartoonist almost out of the gate, and so when he came up with a new idea, usually just for some reason, struck a nerve in America just want bonkers for it.
Yeah, that's a good cliffhanger.
Sh Yeah, I think it's a good place for a break. I don't know if we're hanging on to any cliff here.
All right, we'll be right back to reveal who the murderer is right after this.
So, in addition to foolish questions, he had a whole plethora of other kind of cartoon inventions, not the cartoons, about inventions like cartoon characters and strips that he invented, is what I mean. So there's a I'm the guy which started another national trend. It would be like, I'm the guy who put the Hobo and Hoboken. People love that. I guess it was kind of like the original You might be a redneck gift or here's your sign or something like that.
Yeah, that was what Fox were they recently, by the way, in an airport.
Oh, continue, was he doing like a performance or was he just walking around? No?
No, yeah, he was performing an airport. He had a guitar case up and with there's a bunch of change in there.
Did you say hi?
No? No, no, I just was like, yeah, you didn't give him like.
A low five as you passed him.
No, okay, I should have. Sorry.
So there's the I'm the guy. Another very famous character was Boob McNutt. I've read some of the Boob McNutt strips, and I mean they're involved not funny, even like even if you just kind of take away like the fact that like one hundred something years have passed, it's just not that funny. But they're still cute and adorable and very well done. That's yeah, Yeah, I love the art, Yeah for sure.
So he eventually in nineteen twelve is when he started these rude Goldberg invention drawings, and these really really took off. There was one that was used in the House Stuff Works article as an example. It's that's pretty fun called the simple Mosquito Exterminator. No home should be without it, And I'm just going to read it real quick from Rube Goldberg's own writing. The mosquito enters a window at a and walks along board which is strewn with small chunks of rare steak. After munching steak, as he walks, he's overcome by fumes coming from sponge B, which is soaked in chloroform, and falls on platform C. When he regains consciousness, he looks through the telescope D inspires reflection of bald head E, and there's a guy laying on the bed bald head in mirror. He mistakes this for the real thing, jumps off springboard C through D and dashes his brains. I guess we would say bashes these days out against the mirror, falling lifeless and can f Yeah.
And the reason you kept going through parts of the alphabet reading that is because these invention cartoons were they were like schematics, so like each part was labeled with the letter, and then the corresponding explain nation would say, you know, A and B and all that. So that just kind of made it even cooler. And I think, you know, obviously he had a bit of the spirit of an engineer still, although the spirit of the cartoon like really overwhelmed and throttled and ended up strangling the spirit of the engineer.
Yeah, I love this stuff. I looked at these cartoons all morning. I really really liked them.
That's awesome. There's another character that he made that I read was probably his most famous, at least as far as characters went, Professor Lucifer gorgan Zola Butts and Boobs right exactly. Professor Butts was based on two different professors that Goldberg had in college at the mining school. One was Samuel B. Christi He was the deaning of the mining school. Another was Frederick Slat he was the head of the physics department, and he found them both painfully boring and dry. Apparently, Samuel B. Christie's favorite thing was to explain what degree you should push a wheelbarrow uphill. At for maximum efficiency was that kind of guy, and so he kind of put these two together and created Professor Lucifer Gorganzola Butts. But from his experience with these guys with Slate in particular, kind of like esoteric joke came along that I'm not sure whether he was aware of or not, but he mentions something. I think he wrote an essay that was published something called the Barodic b A R O d I K, which he described as this incredibly convoluted machine that filled an entire laboratory that was meant to measure the mass of the earth. The weight of the earth, I think is the way he put it. And his explanation were like the only account of this machine. And some people got kind of obsessed trying to find like other documentation of this machine. And as this one guy he wrote an article in the U See where was he from Irvine?
From Goldberg?
Yeah?
Oh oh the college?
I thought, yeah, he was in a lumb right U C Berkeley. Anyway, this guy wrote an article called crack Slate and the UC Berkeley. I guess Blue and gold publication, I'm not sure. And he talks about like trying to find documentation and he realizes, like this is this is a figment generally of Goldberg's imagination. There was a machine that had a name similar to that, but it was just a barometer. But he took it and created this huge, basically enormous convoluted machine in his imagination and inadvertently or advertently left a historical joke kind of as a time bomb for somebody to come along and get obsessed with.
Now was that Goldberg or Slate?
So Slay supposedly had that machine in his lab. Goldberg was the one who described it and his his s was the only documentation of it for a while.
Oh okay, okay, I get it now.
Yeah, well, it is interesting that, you know, it's funny to think about these cartoons are just fun and all that stuff, But people have pointed out over the years that, like, you know, these are really commentaries that are more relevant now than they even were back then, which is this idea that machines many times can come along and mess things up. Technology can mess things up, like we can take very simple, elegant processes and make them far more complicated than they need to be because of technology. And I think Goldberg was probably poking around at that idea himself, don't you.
Yeah, Oh, definitely for sure. Well, he was also a conservative, and he viewed like an increasingly large and cumbersome federal government that grew up under FDR as like an example of one of his Goldberg machines, an unnecessarily complicated machine for carrying out a relatively simple task. Yeah, he was also political cartoonists too. He won a pulitzer at least for one or a bulletser, and he also received some death threats for some of them because they didn't always sit well with Americans, and he became so concerned with it he had his family's name changed. So the reason his granddaughter's name is Jennifer George is because his son Thomas changed his name to Thomas George, and his other son, George, followed in Thomas's footsteps and took the name George George. And Jennifer is the daughter of one of them.
Yeah.
He was Jewish, and he he would comment a lot and his cartoons on fascism, on what's going on, and like you said, didn't sit well with a lot of people. And we should point out the one he won, the Bulletzer, was a cartoon in nineteen forty seven that had a little house balanced on a nuclear missile balanced on a precipice and it just said peace today. Obviously a very shaky thing, and he won a bulletzer for that, which is great.
Yeah. And then one last thing, apparently mouse Trap the game actually did lift some components of some of his drawings directly from his cartoons and refused to pay him any royalties for them. What. Yeah, Marvin Glass was to blame for that, boo. So there you go, Chuck Bood Marvin Glass, which, of course means that short stuff is out.
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