The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest
The best-known Rube Goldberg machine contest is the national event
held annually by Theta Tau at Purdue University. The Argonne
Rube Goldberg Machine Contest for High Schools is affiliated with
Theta Tau's national contest. Argonne's 12th annual contest will
be held Friday, March 30, 2007.
Rube Goldberg
The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is named after cartoonist Reuben
Lucius Goldberg, the spirit of whose work inspires the contest's weird machines
and crazy mechanism.
For 55 years Goldberg's award-winning cartoons satirized machines
and gadgets which he saw as excessive. His cartoons combined simple machines
and common household items to create complex, wacky, and diabolically logical
machines that accomplished mundane and trivial tasks. His inventions became so
widely known that Webster's Dictionary added "rube goldberg" to its listing,
defining it as "accomplishing by extremely complex, roundabout means what
seemingly could be done simply."
During his life, Goldberg's drawings included sports cartoons,
comic strips, and political cartoons, but he is best known today for his
ridiculously complex machines.
His "inventions," drawn for our pleasure, can actually work. By
inventing excessively complex ways to accomplish simple tasks, he entertained
us and poked fun at the gadgets designed to make our lives easier. In his
words, the machines were a "symbol of man's capacity for exerting maximum
effort to achieve minimal results." He believed that most people preferred
doing things the hard way instead of using simpler, more direct path s to
accomplish goals.
History of the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest
Rube Goldberg Machine Contests bring Goldberg's cartoons to life
in a way that pulls students away from traditional ways of looking at problems
and sends them spinning into the intuitive, chaotic realm of imagination. The
resulting inventions are collections of bits and pieces, parts of now useless
machines, scraped together to achieve an innovative, imaginative, yet somehow
logical contraption to conquer the job at hand. The contest shows us all the
need for simplicity and the pitfalls of complexity.
In 1949, at the peak of the Goldberg era, the two engineering
fraternities at Purdue University, Theta Tau and Triangle, developed their own
version of the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. The contest was held as part of
the Engineer's Ball, also sponsored at Purdue by the two fraternities. The
competition was fierce between the two rival fraternities as raids on the
machines before the contest and sabotage at the contest occurred more than
once. Soon thereafter, rules were made to disqualify teams attempting such
devious actions. The contest died out with the Engineer's Ball in 1955, when
the two fraternities no longer sponsored the event.
In 1983, some members at Theta Tau's Phi Chapter became interested
in an old trophy they found one day while cleaning. It was the original
traveling trophy from Purdue's first Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. After
searching out information on the contest, they revived it and produced a guide
for others to follow during competition. Doug Berry organized the first
competition, which required the machine to pour an eight-ounce cup of
water.
The contest's popularity has grown each year that Theta Tau has
hosted it at Purdue University. Winners from early years appeared
in nationwide press releases and television appearances on "Late
Night with David Letterman" and "The Tonight Show," as well as
NBC's "The Today Show."
All of this media attention finally paid off in 1988 when Mike
Barrett brought about the first National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. The
nationwide television, radio, and printed media attention has promoted the
growth of the contest to make it bigger and better each year. In 1992, the
contest appeared on televisions all over the world as the TV show "Beyond 2000"
came to Purdue to film the contest and even spent a day filming the progress of
Theta Tau's machine in the fraternity's cramped basement.
The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest has exceeded the hopes and
dreams of it's founders. The contest now has the honor of being Purdue's
largest media event, drawing more attention than any sport or event at the
university. Because of the experience of the contest chairmen of Phi Chapter of
Theta Tau at Purdue University, the world wide media attention, and the
generosity of the contest's sponsors, the contest continues to grow even
today.
Every year, the fraternity, Purdue, and the nation anxiously await
the wild display of innovation and genius, as well as confusion and sometimes
despair which always accompany the running of the contest.
How to build a Rube Goldberg Machine
Welcome to the wacky world of Rube Goldberg. The Rube Goldberg
Machine Contest (RGMC) has come a long way from its humble beginnings as an
inter-fraternity contest. By participating, you help promote the value of
education to young people everywhere. The series of contests which make up the
whole of the RGMC are specially designed for this purpose. Of course, the most
important goal has always been to challenge students to take a few steps back
from reality, gain a new perspective on how things work, and have fun making
the most complicated, roundabout device to complete a simple task. This is the
essence of the RGMC.
As with any ambitious venture, there are two aspects to the
contest. Someone must run each contest and someone must compete. This guide
will explore each side. We will address a number of questions, including: What
is the contest? Why does it go on? How does one arrange a contest, get
contestants, find a space to compete, and get the money to do all this? What is
a Rube Goldberg Machine? What does it look like? How much time will I have to
invest? How do these people come up with these off-the-wall ideas?
We will begin with the most basic component of the contest.
The Rube Goldberg machines you build are different from the
machines people are used to seeing. A good Rube Goldberg machine incorporates
the everyday machines people are used to seeing and connects them in ways that
may seem idiotic or ingenious. It is your mission to construct a machine that
uses at least 20 individual steps to complete an assigned task, which varies
from year to year.
Your machine may take some time to put together. Many machines
undergo months of strategy and planning; other are put together in a few
days.
Over the years, the machines that have done best seem to be those
that arrive at the contest site in sections, as opposed to pieces. The less
work that has to be done to assemble your machine at the site, the better. Too
often, things that work perfectly in the workshop break down during the trip to
the contest site. Most machines arrive in two or three pieces. A platform
should be constructed for the machine with a simple and secure way to fasten it
together; typical platforms are made of plywood and two-by-fours. Steps that
bridge machine sections should be easy to connect. The rest of the machine is
up to you.
Each team plans its machine in its own way. Some teams try to plan
their whole machine before starting to build it; others just dive in head
first. Maybe the best way is to use a little of both approaches. In the end,
you will need a detailed description of the machine for the contest judges, and
as you'll see, much of your early plans for the machine will have changed by
the time you finish building it.
The materials you use are the most important components of the
machine. See what you have around the house, raid your old toy chest, pick up
all those appliances Dad has been meaning to fix, but most importantly, USE
THEM. Anything goes when you are building a Rube Goldberg machine. Rube knew no
bounds when he created his machines, and you should take the same attitude.
Follow the adage ''Nothing is impossible, if you try." Your imagination is your
only limit.
Competing your Rube Goldberg machine
The finished machine is to be no more than five feet tall, six
feet wide and six feet deep. Build your machine so you can reach all the
crucial parts.
The machine has a nine-minute contest time. That means you must be
able to run your machine completely through its paces once, reset it
completely, and run it completely through its paces again, all within nine
minutes. Only two people may touch the machine while it is being reset.
Every team must have a leader. Sometimes, during competition, your
machine will fail, it is the team leader's responsibility to decide whether to
continue the run by helping a step along, or to give up on the run and call a
reset. Each team gets one reset without penalty. When you call a reset, the
time clock is reset to zero and the run starts all over again. Sometimes
calling a reset is better than accepting the penalties incurred by touching the
machine. Sometimes it makes no difference, because the machine fails at the
same point on the second run.
To achieve the best score possible, it is important to understand
the rules and the judging form as presented in these guidelines.
"Rube Goldberg" is a trademark of
Rube Goldberg Inc.
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