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July 4 | |||
 Here is a quintessential Goldberg cartoon showing a multistep process. [Rube Goldberg is the (R) and (c) of Rube Goldberg Inc.] Born on the fourth of July in 1883, Rube Goldberg became an engineer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, a short-story writer, and a sculptor. But it is his cartoons featuring those mind-boggling inventions for which he is best remembered. The one entitled "Professor Butts' Automatic Garage Door Opener" (1928) shows a car bumper hitting a mallet that explodes a cap, which frightens a rabbit tied to a string that discharges a pistol that.... Well, you get the picture. In 18 simple steps, which involve both a sleeping dog and a tank of fish, the garage door opens! His absurd yet logical inventions were known as Rube Goldberg devices and reflected not only the humor he found in daily life, but also his unique view of the often-turbulent relationship between technology and humans. While many of Goldberg's inventions mocked the intrusion of machines into our lives, some, in their own special way, were the forerunners of real technology. The first mass-produced radio-controlled garage door opener was sold in 1954 and required no live animals! Goldberg grew up in San Francisco at the beginning of America's Machine Age. As a young child, he became fascinated by art and spent a good deal of time tracing drawings done by numerous artists and illustrators. At age 11, he began to take formal art lessons--once a week over a period of 3 years, for 50 cents a lesson. Though Goldberg was discouraged from drawing by his father, his interest in art grew, and he hoped to study art after he finished high school. To further dissuade his son from a career in art (an inexplicable career choice that, Goldberg's father insisted to colleagues, could not be blamed on family history*), Max Goldberg enrolled his son in a mining engineering program at the University of California at Berkeley. There, along with taking engineering classes, Rube Goldberg managed to take some drawing classes as well as create cartoons for the college yearbook and humor magazine. After graduating in 1904, Goldberg went to work for the San Francisco city engineer, mapping sewer pipes and water mains, but he only lasted several months before he found his way to a job drawing cartoons and sometimes sweeping the art department floor at the San Francisco Chronicle. He quickly proved himself a talented cartoonist and went on to draw cartoons for a rival San Francisco newspaper, the Bulletin, before moving to New York in 1907 to work as a sports cartoonist and writer. There he created many cartoon series, including Mike and Ike--They Look Alike and Crazy Inventions. His Boob McNutt strip was syndicated as a daily and Sunday cartoon for 20 years. Goldberg was in the right places at the right times for some of history's momentous events--that is, if you can call being in the right place being in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake and visiting Paris four days after World War I began in 1914. He was also sent to Paris in 1918 to report on the peace treaty negotiations. In addition, Goldberg used his talents in a vaudeville act in which he drew cartoons to entertain the audience, made animated films (as early as ), and created print advertisements. And along the way he got married and had two children. When the popularity of his cartoons waned in the 1930s, Goldberg turned to political cartooning. In 1948 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for a political cartoon called "Peace Today"--a comment on the precariousness of the world in the era of the atomic bomb. In the mid-1960s he gave up his job drawing political cartoons and soon after began to sculpt. He died in 1970 at the age of 87. If you are wondering whether his tombstone in some way resembles his inventions, it doesn't. It's a small, simple gravestone inscribed with the signature he used for signing his cartoons and the dates he was born and died: July 4, 1883, and December 7, 1970. *Actually, what Max Goldberg said was, "Our family record is as clean as a whistle. We've never had a single solitary artist in it--not one." (Peter Marzio, Rube Goldberg: His Life and His Work, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 15.) ConnectionsIf you are about to embark on a Rube Goldberg invention project and you would like students to see his work, you can probably get at least one of these books from your library:
Rube Goldberg: His Life and Work, Peter C. Marzio (Harper & Row, New York, 1973). This offers a fairly extensive biography of Goldberg along with numerous examples of his work. The Best of Rube Goldberg, compiled by Charles Keller (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979). All the cartoons in this book feature Goldberg's inventions. Some of the links in the Web Resources and Ready-to-Go Activities sections below offer ideas about Rube Goldberg invention units and provide information about contests your students can enter. Author Peter Marzio notes that Goldberg was partly inspired to create his multiple-stepped contraptions by a chemistry course he took in college. You might want to ask students this question: What do chemistry experiments and Rube Goldberg devices have in common? Marzio also describes a huge (definitely Rube Goldberg-type) machine that was built by one of Goldberg's professors and that also sparked Goldberg's imagination. The machine was supposed to help students figure out how much the Earth weighed (something that no students knew at the beginning or at the end of the course). Ask students to work in small groups and choose an item that couldn't be placed on a scale and determine, very generally, how much it weighs. Explain that the answer is not the focus, but the process they would use to figure out the answer is. You also might want to emphasize the idea that there will be a number of ways to arrive at an answer and that it is okay to make assumptions based on facts as long as the students explain their assumptions. Have the groups create posters or models illustrating their solutions and present their ideas to the class. According to author Maynard Frank Wolfe, Max Goldberg convinced his son that engineering was a good path for an artist to follow--that Leonardo da Vinci and others studied engineering before they became artists. In a class discussion, ask students to consider why might math, or physics, or chemistry, be helpful to know if you were a cartoonist or other kind of artist. In a connection with language arts, inform students that Goldberg's name appears in the dictionary as an adjective. Ask students what they think the definition might be and then have a student check the dictionary and read the definition aloud. You might also ask students to search for the term Rube Goldberg in the popular press and compile a class list of "Rube Goldberg" items--such as a Rube Goldberg tax form! Goldberg's "Crazy Inventions" cartoons were a product of his time. In a link with science and history, talk about what everyday life was like in America at the turn of the century, when running water and the invention of the automobile changed the way people lived. Ask students to name some devices that were coming on the market then to save time and money. Then direct the discussion to the role that technology plays in our lives today. Web Resources
Ready-to-Go Activities
Classroom Resources from the ENC Collection
Teacher Resources from the ENC Collection
Search StrategiesFind more materials by searching Curriculum Resources on ENC Online using these terms: Inventions or Technology. Connections to StandardsRealizing that there are many ways to use this Classroom Calendar entry, we chose these standards because they relate to the entry, in full or in part. If you want to explore the standards further, please use the link(s) provided.
Connections to NSES
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Date: 1998 Grade(s): 9 - 12 
Date: 2003 Grade(s): 6 - 8