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vienna · 05-20-21, 07:35 PM

It just occurred to me that many, particularly those born after the mid-60s, may not know who Rube Goldberg was, in real life; Rube was a native San Franciscan who was trained as and worked as an engineer for the City of San Francisco; he dabbled in cartooning as a side hobby, drawing illustrations of bizarre and complicated machines to accomplish activities that, frankly, were far more easily done by other means, but the fanciful, and humorous, illustrations were a marvel and it drew the attention of local SF newspapers and he quit his job at The City and became a full-time cartoonist; his "useless machines' became a staple of newspaper comic pages for decades; I have vivid memories of myself , as a small child, and my grandfather, Harry, poring over the latest Goldberg cartoon in the daily paper, me sitting on his lap in his big rocking chair, and he explaining all the twists and tuns of the newest Goldberg contraption; Harry was an avid tinkerer, always fixing or improving something or other, and his influence, along with our daily examinations of the Goldberg strips, is what made me adept at sussing out patterns and solutions later in life...

Rube Goldberg - Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg

Rube's legacy still lives on, as his daughter, and now his granddaughter, have preserved his memory by establishing an organization to encourage the continuance of the creation of 'useless machines'; there is an annual Rube Goldberg Machine Challenge, in which contestants try to devise the most extravagant Goldbergesque solutions to an assigned task; due to the Pandemic, there was no in-person contest last year, and, like so many other events, the Challenge was held online; last year's Challenge, in keeping with the pandemic, was to create a machine to deliver a bar of soap to a user for hand washing...

If you go on YT and search for "Rube Goldberg", there are tons of clips by persons who have made their own Goldberg Machines for all kinds of wild purposes; I've spent many hours marveling at the ingenuity, and absurdist sense of humor, of some of the contraptions...

<O>

05-20-21, 07:35 PM	#2146
vienna Navy Seal Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Anywhere but the here & now... Posts: 7,528 Downloads: 85 Uploads: 0	It just occurred to me that many, particularly those born after the mid-60s, may not know who Rube Goldberg was, in real life; Rube was a native San Franciscan who was trained as and worked as an engineer for the City of San Francisco; he dabbled in cartooning as a side hobby, drawing illustrations of bizarre and complicated machines to accomplish activities that, frankly, were far more easily done by other means, but the fanciful, and humorous, illustrations were a marvel and it drew the attention of local SF newspapers and he quit his job at The City and became a full-time cartoonist; his "useless machines' became a staple of newspaper comic pages for decades; I have vivid memories of myself , as a small child, and my grandfather, Harry, poring over the latest Goldberg cartoon in the daily paper, me sitting on his lap in his big rocking chair, and he explaining all the twists and tuns of the newest Goldberg contraption; Harry was an avid tinkerer, always fixing or improving something or other, and his influence, along with our daily examinations of the Goldberg strips, is what made me adept at sussing out patterns and solutions later in life... Rube Goldberg - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg Rube's legacy still lives on, as his daughter, and now his granddaughter, have preserved his memory by establishing an organization to encourage the continuance of the creation of 'useless machines'; there is an annual Rube Goldberg Machine Challenge, in which contestants try to devise the most extravagant Goldbergesque solutions to an assigned task; due to the Pandemic, there was no in-person contest last year, and, like so many other events, the Challenge was held online; last year's Challenge, in keeping with the pandemic, was to create a machine to deliver a bar of soap to a user for hand washing... If you go on YT and search for "Rube Goldberg", there are tons of clips by persons who have made their own Goldberg Machines for all kinds of wild purposes; I've spent many hours marveling at the ingenuity, and absurdist sense of humor, of some of the contraptions... <O> __________________ __________________________________________________ __ Last edited by vienna; 05-20-21 at 07:45 PM.