Shelby's science project

This is a "Rube Goldberg" project, designed to use the most difficult means possible to turn off a light bulb.

Shelby designed it, and Shelby and Arthur put it together. Shelby's report on this project is below:

(click on the image to run the project) This is a VIDEO!!!...




WHO IS RUBE GOLDBERG?
Report by Shelby Waller

Rube Goldberg won the Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons. He was also a sculptor and an author.

Reuben Lucius Goldberg (Rube Goldberg) was born in San Francisco. His father was very practical and his father thought that it was necessary that Rube should go to college and become and engineer. Rube ended up going to the University of California Berkeley. After graduation he worked for the City of San Francisco as an engineer. He worked in the Water and Sewers Department.

Rube always was drawing, and after six months convinced his father that he had to work as an artist. He got a job in an office at a San Francisco newspaper. He worked in the sports department. He kept turning in his illustrations and cartoons to his editor, until they finally made it into the newspaper. A wonderful accomplishment, he moved from San Francisco to New York. He began illustrating daily cartoons for the Evening Mail. A founder of the National Cartoonist Society, a political cartoonist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, Rube was a loved national character as well as a radio and television personality during his sixty-year career.

Through his inventions, Rube Goldberg invented hard ways to get easy results. His drawings were elements of man's accommodation for using maximum effort to achieve minimal results. He believed that there were two ways to do things: the simple way and the hard way, and that a surprising number of people preferred doing things the hard way.

Rube’s inventions will withstand time because he gave importance to simple human needs and admired basic human values. He was sometimes hesitating about technology, which added to making his own inventions 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 cartoons show absurd machines working in extremely complex and roundabout ways to produce a simple end result; because of this Rube Goldberg has become connected with any bizarre system of achieving a basic task. Rube's inventions are a unique comment on life's complications. They show a humorous diversion into the absurd parodies of the wonders of technology. Rube's funny 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.BR>