Photo: Samuel Stevens, a sophomore majoring in agricultural and biological engineering, describes his team's (non-winning) entry in the Rube Goldberg contest at the Tate Student Center. Photo by Paul Efland.
By Laura Wexler
The dictionary entry for the adjective Rube Goldberg goes something like this: "designating any very complicated invention, machine, scheme, etc., laboriously contrived to perform a seemingly simple operation."
In just that spirit of maximum effort for minimum result, nine teams of undergraduate agricultural and biological engineering students gathered in Georgia Hall of the Tate Student Center Feb. 25 to see whose machine could screw a lid on a jar in the most complicated way. Contest rules required that each machine complete at least 25 steps before the lid and the jar became one--the stranger the steps, the better. As the contest entries demonstrated, bubbling red goo, Skittles, matchbox cars, pool balls, and vodka and orange juice prove as functional as levers, weights and inclined planes.
"Putting a lid on a jar--you think it's easy until you have to do it in 25 steps or more," says sophomore agricultural engineering student Jason Brown, whose team designed their entry to make use of an old Commodore 64 typewriter they found in the trash. They developed a ""retro"" theme, complete with peace symbol, tie-dye painting, and sparkly disco ball.
The original Rube Goldberg contest was established in 1949 by two rival engineering fraternities at Purdue University. It took its inspiration from the American cartoonist, famous for drawing wildly complex mechanisms to accomplish the most mundane tasks. The contest has spread, and now engineering students all over the nation transform themselves into mad inventors for a few weeks each year, creating the weirdest, silliest, yet most logical designs possible. Although biological and agricultural engineering students have been creating Rube Goldberg machines in professor Tim Foutz's design-methodology class for four years, this is only the second year for the competition.
Foutz says the exercise of creating such machines teaches students quality functional development--that engineers must first discern their clients' needs and then design a machine to meet them. This project, says Foutz, is particularly challenging for students who aren't naturally handy with tools.
"It's probably one of the first times they get to do hands-on engineering work," he says. "It unleashes their innovation and creativity."
Willy Wonka certainly would have been proud of the second-place winner, the Screwdriver Team. They listed 41 steps for their entry, including "dowel rod pokes golf ball, first golf ball hits second golf ball down inclined plane, third golf ball triggers mouse trap, hinge on platform releases, weighted sock falls." Eventually orange juice and vodka filled a Ball jar, and the lid was screwed on.
Each team was given nine minutes to run its machine through its paces twice, and every team besides the Eight Ball Express--which eventually took first prize--encountered glitches during at least one run-through. The Eight Ball Express began their 34-step series with a nudge to an eight-ball, which triggered a set of marbles, which rolled down several ramps, which pulled weights, which activated the jar, which spun the lid onto the jar and ended with the hanging of a stuffed alligator.
The crowd went wild.
