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Siteseeing: Fun site for kids... Rube Goldberg
Children & Family | SiteSeeing
http://blueballfixed.ytmnd.com/
Excerpt origins unknown: If anyone knows the cite, please post a comment.
" Rube Goldberg Biography
Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor,
and author.
Reuben Lucius Goldberg (Rube Goldberg) was born in San Francisco. His
father, a practical man, insisted he go to college to become an engineer.
After graduating from University of California Berkeley, Rube went to work
as an engineer with the City of San Francisco Water and Sewers Department.
He continued drawing, and after six months convinced his father that he had
to work as an artist. He soon got a job as an office boy in the sports
department of a San Francisco newspaper. He kept submitting drawings and
cartoons to his editor, until he was finally published. An outstanding
success, he moved from San Francisco to New York drawing daily cartoons for
the Evening Mail. A founding member of the National Cartoonist Society, a
political cartoonist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, Rube was a beloved
national figure as well as an often-quoted radio and television personality
during his sixty-year professional career.
Through his "INVENTIONS", Rube Goldberg discovered difficult ways to achieve
easy results. His cartoons were, as he said, symbols of man's capacity for
exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results. Rube believed that
there were two ways to do things: the simple way and the hard way, and that
a surprisingly number of people preferred doing things the hard way.
Rube Goldberg's work will endure because he gave priority to simple human
needs and treasured basic human values. He was sometimes skeptical about
technology, which contributed to making his own mechanical inventions
primitive and full of human, plant, and animal parts. While most machines
work to make difficult tasks simple, his inventions made simple tasks
amazingly complex. Dozens of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups, and rods
were put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles,
and live animals for simple tasks like squeezing an orange for juice or
closing a window in case it should start to rain before one gets home.
Rube's drawings depict absurdly-connected machines functioning in extremely
complex and roundabout ways to produce a simple end result; because of this
RUBE GOLDBERG has become associated with any convoluted system of achieving
a basic task.
Rube's inventions are a unique commentary on life's complexities. They
provide a humorous diversion into the absurd that lampoons the wonders of
technology. Rube's hilarious send-ups of man's ingenuity strike a deep and
lasting chord with today's audience through caught in a high-tech revolution
are still seeking simplicity.
Hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, National Public Radio, The
Wall Street Journal or some other major media invoking the name Rube
Goldberg to describe a wildly complex program, system or set of rules such
as our "Rube Goldberg-like tax system". The annual National Rube Goldberg
Machine Contest at Purdue University, which is covered widely by the
national media, brings Rube's comic inventions to life for millions of fans.
The work of Rube Goldberg continues to connect with both an adult audience
well versed in the promise and pitfalls of modern technology (can anyone
over 40 program their VCR?) as well as younger fans intrigued by the
creativity and possibility of invention. "
