Comic Feature – Rube Goldberg
Rube Goldberg was an inventor, an engineer, and a sculptor and multi-award-winning cartoonist who drew incredible and amusing contraptions. His Rube Goldberg machines live on to this day in physics classes and popular media. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his editorial cartoon “Peace Today which conveyed a warning against atomic weapons.
Rube Goldberg was born to Jewish parents on July 4, 1883 in San Fransisco. He began drawing at a young age, to such an extent that his parents arranged professional drawing lessons for him at the age of 11. His father encouraged him to study engineering and he earned a degree from the University of California in 1904. He took a job designing sewer pipes for the San Francisco Sewer Department
A few months later he became a sportswriter and cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Bulletin. He also briefly worked for the New York Evening Mail, creating three long-running comic strips. His most popular drawings depicted complex gadgets that performed even the simplest tasks in convoluted, elaborate ways, known as Rube Goldberg machines.
Rube was fascinated by the advancement of technology and thought it humorous as people either embraced change and the benefits technology brought or were reluctant as it seemingly increased dependency and laziness. He personally believed people preferred choosing a more difficult route instead of completing a goal simply and directly.
As he said, “the machines are a symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results”
His inventions were interesting as he did the complete opposite of what most machines do – instead of making difficult things easy, he made easy things difficult. On his “Rube Goldberg Machine” work, he would spend over 30 hours on each piece with close attention to precision regarding the lines and details. n his cartoons, they were created by a character called Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts.
The National Cartoonists Society, in which Goldberg was the first president, named the Rueben Award in his honour, to recognize the “Cartoonist of the Year”.He also received several awards from the National Cartoonists Society including the Gold T-Square Award in 1955, the 1969 Rueben Award and the Gold Key Award, after his death in 1970. To further add to this list of accomplishments, he won the Banshee’s Silver Lady Award in 1959, he was a co-founder of the Famous Artists School , President of the Artists and Writers Club and a member of the Society of Illustrators. To this day high schools and universities worldwide, there are Rube Goldberg contests which challenge students to create intricate machines to do easy tasks
“I do not count the years. Tomorrow is just another day to create something I hope will be worthwhile.” Rube Goldberg
SOURCES: BIOGRAPHY, WIKIPEDIA, STUDY, RUBE GOLDBERG
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