Gallery: Outrageously Complicated Rube Goldberg Videos
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Cartoonist Rube Goldberg got famous drawing fanciful, bizarrely complex, jury-rigged contraptions to accomplish simple tasks.
Not content with imagining these things, modern Rube Goldberg machine makers put such machines together in real life (or in virtual worlds) so you can actually see them go. There’s even a contest for the best.
A team of aspiring educators won the 2010 National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on March 27 with a complicated homage to ancient Egypt that took 120 discrete mechanical and electronic steps to accomplish one simple task: Dispensing a bit of hand sanitizer. The video above shows how the students, from the University of Wisconsin-Stout, beat out dozens of other teams to win the prize.
But while the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest has been going on for 23 years, it’s hardly the only place to find such outlandish devices. The internet is full of videos showing Rube Goldberg machines (or Heath Robinson contraptions, as the English call them), from impromptu assemblages to painstakingly engineered constructions.
In the following pages we’ll show you a few of the best.
For more on the National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, check out this gallery of Rube Goldberg machine photos published by Wired in 2007.
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