Rube

Rube

Early Education: At a young age, he loved drawing, tracing and being creative but this was discouraged by his parents. In 1900 he graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco and in 1904, he graduated with a degree in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley . He was then hired as an engineer by the city of San Francisco but eventually quit to become a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle but left only a year later to work with the San Francisco Bulletin. In 1907 he moved to New York where he worked for several newspapers and by 1915, soon found national acclaim as a copious artist. He married Irma Seeman in 1916 and had two children, Thomas and George. When World War II came along, he demanded his sons change their name for their protection as he was receiving hate mail due to his controversial political cartoons. One son became a painter, the other a Hollywood writer and producer. In 1938, Rube Goldberg gave up cartooning and wrote popular articles and stories but returned to editorial cartooning for the New York Sun. Later, he was employed by the New York Journal America until his retirement in 1964 where thereafter he made bronze sculptors.

His cartoon strips were popular but the work that gave him unforgettable lifelong fame was the character he created, Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. Using the character, he would illustrate inventions that later become known as the “Rube Goldberg Machine”. A “Rube Goldberg Machine” is an extremely complicated device that executes a very simple task in a complex, indirect way. This is now used as an expression to describe any system that's confusing or complicated and came about from Goldberg's illustrations of absurd machines.

The first illustration depicting a “Rube Goldberg Machine” was an Automatic Weight Reducing Machine in 1914 using components such as a donut, bomb, wax, balloon and hot stove to trap an obese person in a sound and food proof prison, who had to lose weight before wriggling free. He used many simple subjects and made them humorous yet awfully complicated and tedious. This included scratching insect bites, scrubbing your back in a bath, opening a window, collecting mail and finding a ball.