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Short Stuff: Rube Goldberg · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, There's Chuck.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Jerry's here too, Dave Saran Sperre. Let's get going.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: Big thanks to stell simonton great name one of the
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: great house Stuffworks dot com writers. And I am really
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: thrilled with this one because I had always known about
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: and heard the term and fully understood what Rube Goldberg meant.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: A Rube Goldberg machine is something that is really complex
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: and kind of awesome, and it's usually some kind of
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: crazy contraption that ends up doing something very very simply
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: in a way that's far too complicated than it needs
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: to be, right. And I know that because it's a
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: very common term. It's been around since in the dictionary
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: actually since nineteen thirty one. But I never, until like yesterday,
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: knew that Rube Goldberg was like a dude and he
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: was a cartoonist and that's where it came from. He
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: drew cartoons about these machines.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: It was very popular for it.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, I guess I knew that already, and
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure, yeah I did. I think one of
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the things my first introduction to Rube Goldberg was that
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: game mouse Trap.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: Remember that of course I have one, and we have
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: one in Ruby's room.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, there you go. So that was directly lifted in
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: some ways from Rube Goldberg cartoons. And that must have
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: been where like the springboard for me, that going into
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: me in a bathtub, that went down a pole and
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: dropped me off in a fountain of molasses.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he had a mouse trap cartoon. It wasn't what
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: they did in the game, but clearly inspired by that
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: kind of thing. He did like fifty thousand cartoons. When
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: I look at his stuff, I'm sure you looked at
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: a ton of these cartoons. I really like the actual
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: contraption stuff, not so much to the others, but he
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: it reminds it was not unlike r Crumb in style
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: for sure. And I went and looked it up, and
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: apparently Rube Goldberg is one of quite a few artists
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: that inspired arkrum So it made sense.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Oh okay, good catch man.
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sort of Arkrummy.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: One of the other little interesting tibits about Rube Goldberg
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  Speaker 1: to get started is his name is the only name
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: listed as an adjective in Merriam Webster Dictionary. Yeah, and
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: there are other names listed, but they're altered like Machiavellian.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: This is just Rube Goldberg is an adjective to describe
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: something that is unnecessarily complicated.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Well, your name is the only name that is in
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: the dictionary as a verb.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: That's true.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: Got to clark somebody.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Something Clark me that mousetrap born ging amazing.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: I didn't even think about that. You and Rube.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Goldberg, yep, pals forever?
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: All right?
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: So Rube Goldberg was born Ruben Garrett Lucius Goldberg kincaid,
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: great name, born on the fourth of July in eighteen
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: eighty three in San Francisco. And this all makes sense.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: He was an engineer. He went to school at cal
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Berkeley and got an engineering degree, So you know, it
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: sort of makes sense that all these sort of contraptions
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: he drew in these cartoons came from an engineer's brain.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess he was a cartoonist at heart, at
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: the very least. His granddaughter who wrote a book about him.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Her name was Jennifer or is Jennifer George. Her book
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: is the Art of Rube Goldberg. And she said that
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: what he cared most about was if he made you laugh.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: And there's not that much room to do that as
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: a mining engineer, right, So he spent about six months
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: after he got his degree he graduated, he spent six
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: months mapping water and sewer lines and he said, this
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: is this is not the job for me, and he quit.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: It was a pretty well paying job and decamped to
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: New York, where he took a much lower paying job
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: at the New York Evening Mail as a cartoonist because
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: that's what he wanted to do, so he decided to
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: do it. He was that kind of guy.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: You know what else he did that kind of knocked
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: me out. What In the book, his granddaughter talked about
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: the fact that he was a writer. He was a
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: sculptor later in life. But he wrote a three Stooges movie.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's right before they were well known, and
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: they were Ted Healy and his Stooges.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: It was pre uh, I'm gonna say the wrong stooge.
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: I can't remember.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Curly pre Shemp might have been pre Curly. The original
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: three was Curly Mow.
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: And Larry Okay, I think it was, and then Shep.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Came after Curly, and then you had Curly Joe, and
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: then you had Joe Besser and then you had, like
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: the Harlem Globetrotters and Scooba View for some.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: Reason, Dare we do one on the Three Stooges at
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: some point?
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  Speaker 1: That'd be fun definitely.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: Anyway, He wrote the Three Stooges movie Soup to Nuts,
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  Speaker 2: but ended up, like you said, being a cartoonist and
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: first got his fame drawing a cartoon that was of
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: the time. It's not so funny now, but they were
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: called foolish Questions. I did close to five hundred of these,
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: and one example was it would be a guy that
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: had just fallen from a tall building on the ground
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: and a lady comes up and says, are you hurt?
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: And he says, no, I'm taking my beauty sleep.
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  Speaker 3: So does it translate?
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  Speaker 2: Is like the funniest thing these days, but it really
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: does just gangbusters in the early nineteen hundreds of Yeah.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: That was one thing he had a knack for was
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: creating national fads. So people from around the country send
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: in suggestions for foolish questions, and he wrote I think
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  Speaker 1: he drew five hundred of them. Did you say they're
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: four hundred.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: And fifty yeah, close to it.
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  Speaker 1: So that was just a kind of like a trait
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: of his career. He was a nationally syndicated cartoonist almost
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: out of the gate, and so when he came up
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: with a new idea, usually just for some reason, struck
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  Speaker 1: a nerve in America just want bonkers for it.
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good cliffhanger.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Sh Yeah, I think it's a good place for a break.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: I don't know if we're hanging on to any cliff here.
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  Speaker 3: All right, we'll be right back to reveal who the
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: murderer is right after this.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: So, in addition to foolish questions, he had a whole
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: plethora of other kind of cartoon inventions, not the cartoons,
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: about inventions like cartoon characters and strips that he invented,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: is what I mean. So there's a I'm the guy
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: which started another national trend. It would be like, I'm
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: the guy who put the Hobo and Hoboken. People love that.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: I guess it was kind of like the original You
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: might be a redneck gift or here's your sign or
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: something like that.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was what Fox were they recently, by the way,
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: in an airport.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Oh, continue, was he doing like a performance or was
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: he just walking around? No?
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: No, yeah, he was performing an airport. He had a
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: guitar case up and with there's a bunch of change
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  Speaker 3: in there.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Did you say hi?
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: No? No, no, I just was like, yeah, you didn't
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: give him like.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: A low five as you passed him.
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: No, okay, I should have. Sorry.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: So there's the I'm the guy. Another very famous character
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: was Boob McNutt. I've read some of the Boob McNutt strips,
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: and I mean they're involved not funny, even like even
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: if you just kind of take away like the fact
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: that like one hundred something years have passed, it's just
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: not that funny. But they're still cute and adorable and
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: very well done. That's yeah, Yeah, I love the art,
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah for sure.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: So he eventually in nineteen twelve is when he started
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  Speaker 2: these rude Goldberg invention drawings, and these really really took off.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: There was one that was used in the House Stuff
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: Works article as an example. It's that's pretty fun called
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: the simple Mosquito Exterminator. No home should be without it,
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: And I'm just going to read it real quick from
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  Speaker 2: Rube Goldberg's own writing. The mosquito enters a window at
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: a and walks along board which is strewn with small
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: chunks of rare steak. After munching steak, as he walks,
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  Speaker 2: he's overcome by fumes coming from sponge B, which is
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: soaked in chloroform, and falls on platform C. When he
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: regains consciousness, he looks through the telescope D inspires reflection
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: of bald head E, and there's a guy laying on
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: the bed bald head in mirror. He mistakes this for
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  Speaker 2: the real thing, jumps off springboard C through D and
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: dashes his brains. I guess we would say bashes these
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: days out against the mirror, falling lifeless and can f Yeah.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And the reason you kept going through parts of the
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: alphabet reading that is because these invention cartoons were they
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: were like schematics, so like each part was labeled with
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: the letter, and then the corresponding explain nation would say,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: you know, A and B and all that. So that
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: just kind of made it even cooler. And I think,
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: you know, obviously he had a bit of the spirit
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: of an engineer still, although the spirit of the cartoon
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: like really overwhelmed and throttled and ended up strangling the
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  Speaker 1: spirit of the engineer.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love this stuff. I looked at these cartoons
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: all morning. I really really liked them.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: That's awesome. There's another character that he made that I
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: read was probably his most famous, at least as far
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: as characters went, Professor Lucifer gorgan Zola Butts and Boobs
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: right exactly. Professor Butts was based on two different professors
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: that Goldberg had in college at the mining school. One
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: was Samuel B. Christi He was the deaning of the
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: mining school. Another was Frederick Slat he was the head
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: of the physics department, and he found them both painfully
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: boring and dry. Apparently, Samuel B. Christie's favorite thing was
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: to explain what degree you should push a wheelbarrow uphill.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: At for maximum efficiency was that kind of guy, and
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: so he kind of put these two together and created
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Professor Lucifer Gorganzola Butts. But from his experience with these
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: guys with Slate in particular, kind of like esoteric joke
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: came along that I'm not sure whether he was aware
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: of or not, but he mentions something. I think he
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: wrote an essay that was published something called the Barodic
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: b A R O d I K, which he described
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: as this incredibly convoluted machine that filled an entire laboratory
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: that was meant to measure the mass of the earth.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: The weight of the earth, I think is the way
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: he put it. And his explanation were like the only
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: account of this machine. And some people got kind of
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: obsessed trying to find like other documentation of this machine.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: And as this one guy he wrote an article in
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: the U See where was he from Irvine?
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: From Goldberg?
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: Oh oh the college?
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: I thought, yeah, he was in a lumb right U
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: C Berkeley. Anyway, this guy wrote an article called crack
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Slate and the UC Berkeley. I guess Blue and gold publication,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure. And he talks about like trying to
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: find documentation and he realizes, like this is this is
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: a figment generally of Goldberg's imagination. There was a machine
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: that had a name similar to that, but it was
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: just a barometer. But he took it and created this huge,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: basically enormous convoluted machine in his imagination and inadvertently or
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: advertently left a historical joke kind of as a time
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: bomb for somebody to come along and get obsessed with.
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: Now was that Goldberg or Slate?
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: So Slay supposedly had that machine in his lab. Goldberg
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: was the one who described it and his his s
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: was the only documentation of it for a while.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: Oh okay, okay, I get it now.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it is interesting that, you know, it's funny
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: to think about these cartoons are just fun and all
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: that stuff, But people have pointed out over the years that, like,
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: you know, these are really commentaries that are more relevant
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: now than they even were back then, which is this
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: idea that machines many times can come along and mess
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: things up. Technology can mess things up, like we can
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: take very simple, elegant processes and make them far more
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: complicated than they need to be because of technology. And
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: I think Goldberg was probably poking around at that idea himself,
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: don't you.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Oh, definitely for sure. Well, he was also a conservative,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: and he viewed like an increasingly large and cumbersome federal
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: government that grew up under FDR as like an example
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: of one of his Goldberg machines, an unnecessarily complicated machine
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: for carrying out a relatively simple task. Yeah, he was
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: also political cartoonists too. He won a pulitzer at least
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: for one or a bulletser, and he also received some
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: death threats for some of them because they didn't always
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: sit well with Americans, and he became so concerned with
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: it he had his family's name changed. So the reason
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: his granddaughter's name is Jennifer George is because his son
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Thomas changed his name to Thomas George, and his other son, George,
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: followed in Thomas's footsteps and took the name George George.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: And Jennifer is the daughter of one of them.
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: He was Jewish, and he he would comment a lot
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: and his cartoons on fascism, on what's going on, and
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: like you said, didn't sit well with a lot of people.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: And we should point out the one he won, the Bulletzer,
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: was a cartoon in nineteen forty seven that had a
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: little house balanced on a nuclear missile balanced on a
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: precipice and it just said peace today. Obviously a very
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: shaky thing, and he won a bulletzer for that, which
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: is great.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And then one last thing, apparently mouse Trap the
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: game actually did lift some components of some of his
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: drawings directly from his cartoons and refused to pay him
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: any royalties for them. What. Yeah, Marvin Glass was to
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: blame for that, boo. So there you go, Chuck Bood
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: Marvin Glass, which, of course means that short stuff is out.
• 14:24
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