Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Rube Goldberg

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Everyone knows what a Rube Goldberg machine is, but what do you know about the cartoonist who they're named after?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck Jerry's here too, Dave Ciren's spirit here let's get going. Big thanks to Still Asylumton, great name one of the great house stuff works.com writers and I am really thrilled with this one because I had always known about and heard the term and fully understood what Ruben Goldberg meant. A Ruben Goldberg machine is something that is really complex and kind of awesome, and it's usually some kind of crazy contraption that ends up doing something very, very simply in a way that's far too complicated than it needs to be.

And I know that because it's a very common term. It's been around since, in the dictionary actually since 1931, but I never until like yesterday knew that Rubbe Goldberg was like a dude and he was a cartoonist. And that's where it came from. He drew cartoons about these machines. It was very popular for it. Yeah, for sure. I guess I knew that already and I'm not sure. Did you know that?

Yeah, I did. I think one of the things, my first introduction to Rubbe Goldberg was that game mouse trap. Remember that? Of course I have one in Rubbe's room. Okay, there you go. So that was directly lifted in some ways from Rubbe Goldberg cartoons and that must have been where the springboard for me, that got into me in a bathtub that went down a pole and dropped me off in a fountain of molasses. Yeah, he had a mouse trap cartoon. It wasn't what they did in the game, but clearly inspired by that kind of thing. He did like 50,000 cartoons. When I look at his stuff,

I'm sure you looked at a ton of these cartoons. I really like the actual contraption stuff Not so much the others, but he it reminded it was not unlike our crumb in style and I went and looked it up and apparently Rube Goldberg is one of quite a few artists that inspired our crumb so it made sense. Oh, okay. Good catch, man Yeah, it's sort of Arkramy. One of the other little interesting tidbits about Rube Goldberg to get started is his name is the only name listed as an adjective in Miriam Webster dictionary. And there are other names listed, but they're altered, like Machiavellian.

This is just Rube Goldberg as an adjective to describe something that is unnecessarily complicated. Well, your name is the only name that is in the dictionary as a verb. That's true. Got to Clark somebody something. Clark me that Maustrat Boardking. Amazing. I didn't even think about that. You and Rube Goldberg. Yeah, pals forever. All right. So, Ruben Goldberg was born Ruben Garrett Lucius Goldberg. King Cade. Great name. Born on the 4th of July in 1883 in San Francisco and this all makes sense. He was an engineer. He went to school at Cal Berkeley and got an engineering degree. So it sort of makes sense that all these sort of contraptions he drew in these cartoons came from an engineer's brain.

Yeah, I guess he was a cartoonist at heart, at the very least his granddaughter who wrote a book about him. Her name was Jennifer, or is Jennifer George. Her book is The Art of Rubbe Goldberg. And she said that what he cared most about was if he made you laugh. And there's not that much room to do that in as a mining engineer. So he spent about six months after he got his degree, he graduated, he spent six months mapping water and sewer lines and he said this is not the job for me. And he quit. It was a pretty well-paying job in DeCamp to New York, where he took a much lower paying job at the New York evening

mail as a cartoonist, because that's what he wanted to do. So he decided to do it. He was that kind of guy. You know what else he did that kind of knocked me out? What? In the book his granddaughter talked about the fact that he he was a writer he was a sculptor later in life but he wrote a three stooches movie oh yeah that's right before they were well known that they were headhealy in his stooches

it was pre uh... uh... i'm gonna say the wrong stooge i can't remember pre-curly pre-shemp might have been pre-curly out of the original three was curly mo and Larry Okay, I think it was Now it came after curly and then you had curly Joe and then you had Joe Besser and then you had like The Harlem Globetrotters and Scooby-Doo for some reason dare we do one on the three stuages at some point That'd be fun definitely

Anyway, he wrote the three stuages at some point? That'd be fun. Definitely. Anyway, he wrote the three stuages movie, Soup to Nuts. But ended up like you said, being a cartoonist and first got his fame drawing a cartoon that was of the time. It's not so funny now, but they were called foolish questions. I did close to 500 of these and one example was it would be a guy that had just fallen from a tall building on the ground and a lady comes up and says, are you hurt? And he says, no, I'm taking my beauty sleep. So, Translate is like the funniest thing these days, but just gangbusters in the early 1900s. Yeah, that was one thing he had a knack for was creating national fads. So people from around the country sent in suggestions for foolish questions.

And he wrote, I think you drew 500 of them. Did you say they're 450? Yeah, close to it. So that was just kind of like a trait of his career. He was a nationally syndicated cartoonist, almost out of the gate. And so when he came up with a new idea, usually just for some reason struck a nerve

in America just want bonkers for it. Yeah. So that's a good cliffhanger. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a good place for a break. I don't know if we're hanging on any cliff here. All right.

We'll be right back to reveal who the murderer is right after this. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events.

We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows.

What's up, fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker, and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom.

Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me. As I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, in addition to foolish questions, he had a whole plethora of other kind of cartoon inventions, not the cartoons about inventions like cartoon characters and strips that he invented is what I mean So there's the I'm the guy which started another national trend It would be like I'm the guy who put the hobo and hobo can Mm-hmm people love that. I guess it was kind of like the original you might be a redneck if or here's your sign or something like that

Yeah, that was box where they recently, by the way, in an airport. Continue. Was he doing like a performance or was he walking around? Yeah, he was performing in airport. He had a guitar case up and there was a bunch of change in there. Did you say hi? No, no, I just was like, oh, you didn't give him like a low five as you passed him. No. Okay. That should have, sorry. So there was the, I'm the guy. Another very famous character was Bubmichnutt. I read some of the Bubmichnutt strips.

I mean, they're involved. Mm-hmm. Not funny. Even like, even if you just kind of take away like the fact that like 100 something years have passed. It's just not that funny, but they're still cute and adorable and very well done. Yeah, yeah, I love the art. Yeah, for sure. So he eventually in 1912 is when he started these Rube Goldberg invention drawings and these really really took off. There was one that was used in the House

Stuff Works article as an example. It's pretty fun. It's called the Simple Mosquito Exterminator. No home should be without it. And I'm just going to read it real quick from Ruben Goldberg's own writing. The Mosquito enters a window at A and walks along board, which is strewn with small chunks of rare steak. After munching steak as he walks, he's overcome by fumes coming from sponge B, which is soaked in chloroform and falls on platform C when he regains consciousness. He looks through the telescope D and spies reflection of bald head E, and there's a guy

laying on the bed, bald head. In mirror, he mistakes this for the real thing, jumps off springboard C through D and dashes his brains, I guess we would say, dashes these days, out against the mirror, falling lifeless in can F. Yeah, and the reason you kept going through parts of the alphabet reading that is because these invention cartoons were, they were like schematics. So like each part was labeled with the letter

and then the corresponding explanation would say, you know, A and B and all that. So that just kind of made it even cooler. And I think, you know, obviously he had a bit of the spirit of an engineer still, although the spirit of the cartoon like really overwhelmed and throttled and ended up strangling the spirit of the cartoon like really overwhelmed and throttle and ended up strangling the spirit of the engineer. Yeah, I love this stuff. I looked at these cartoons all morning. I really, really like them.

That's awesome. There's another character that he made that I read was probably as most famous at least as far as characters went. Professor Lucifer Gorgon Zola butts. And Professor Butts. Right, exactly. Professor Butts was based on two different professors that Goldberg had in college at the mining school. One was Samuel B. Christie. He was the Dean of the mining school. In other was Frederick Slate.

He was the head of the physics department. And he found them both painfully boring and dry. Apparently Samuel B. Christie's favorite thing was to explain what degree you should push a wheelbarrow uphill at for maximum efficiency. He was that kind of guy. And so he kind of put these two together and created Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola butts. But from his experience with these guys with slate in particular, a kind of like esoteric joke came along that I'm not sure whether he was aware of or not.

But he mentions something, I think he wrote an essay that was published, something called the Barotic, B-A-R-O-D-I-K, which he described as this incredibly convoluted machine that filled an entire laboratory that was meant to measure the mass of the earth, the weight of the earth, I think is the way he put it. Yeah. And his explanation were like the other documentation of this machine and as this one guy he wrote an article in the UC. Where was he from Irvine? Berkley, San Francisco. No, he's from UC. Yeah. Oh, oh the college. I thought you had he was an alum, right? I think so you see Berkeley anyway This guy wrote an article called crack slate in the LUM, right? I think so. UC Berkeley, anyway, this guy wrote an article called Crackslate in the UC Berkeley, I guess, blue and gold publication, I'm not sure. He talks about trying to find documentation and he realizes this is a figment generally

of Goldberg's imagination. There was a machine that had a name similar to that, but it was just a barometer, but he took it and created this huge, basically enormous convoluted machine in his imagination, inadvertently or inadvertently left a historical joke kind of as a time bomb for somebody to come along and get obsessed with. Now, was that Goldberg or Slate? So Slate supposedly had that machine in his lab. Goldberg was the one who described it.

And his essay was the only documentation of it for a while. Okay, okay, I get it now. Well, it is interesting that it's funny to think about these cartoons are just fun and all that stuff, but people have pointed out over the years that like, you know, these are really commentaries that are more relevant now than they even were back then, which is this idea that machines, many times, can come along and mess things up. Technology can mess things up, like we can take very simple, elegant processes and make them far more complicated than they need to be because of technology. And I think Goldberg was probably poking around at that idea himself, don't you?

Yeah, definitely, for sure. Well, he was also a conservative and he viewed like an increasingly large and cumbersome federal government that grew up under FDR as like an example of one of his Goldberg machines and unnecessarily complicated machine for carrying out a relatively simple task. Yeah, he was also a political cartoonist too. He won a Pulitzer, at least for a winner, Pulitzer. And he also received some death threats for some of them

because they didn't always sit well with Americans. And he became so concerned with it, he had his family's name changed. So the reason his granddaughter's name is Jennifer George is because his son Thomas changed his name to Thomas George. And his other son George followed in Thomas' footsteps and took the name George George. And Jennifer is the daughter of one of them. Yeah, he was Jewish and he would come in a lot in his cartoons on fascism and what's going on. And like you said, it didn't sit well with a lot of people.

And we should point out the one he won, the Pulitzer, was a cartoon in 1947 that had a little house balanced on a nuclear missile, balanced on a precipice, and it just said peace today. Obviously a very shaky thing, and he won a Pulitzer for that, which is great. Yeah, and then one last thing, apparently Mouse trap the game actually did lift some components of some of his drawings

directly from his cartoons, and refuse to pay him any royalties for them. What? Yeah, Marvin Glass was royalties for them. What? Yeah, Marvin Glass was to blame for that. Boo. So there you go. Chuck Bood, Marvin Glass, which of course means that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio.

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