Reuben Lucius Goldberg

Rube Goldberg (1883-1970).

Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor, author, father, and practical man. Rube studied engineering at University of California, Berkeley and immediately took a job as an engineer with the City of San Francisco Water and Sewers Department. After six months with the city he convinced his father he wanted to be an artist, quit his job and started working as an office boy in the sports department of a San Francisco newspaper where he submitted drawings and cartoons to his editor until he was published a few months later. His work was immediately an outstanding success, the Evening Mail offered him a job, and he moved to New York to draw daily cartoons.

His work demonstrates overly-complex methods of achieving basic results. He said his cartoons were symbols of the human capacity to exert maximum effort to accomplish minimal results. He believed there were two ways to do things: the simple way and the hard way, and that a surprising number of people preferred doing things the hard way. His name is synonymous with any complex program, system or set of rules resulting in a simple task.

A recent Goldberg machine.