When he was teaching Physics at Seaside High School, my brother held a Rube Goldberg Machine competition for his students. They worked in teams and were given a specific goal to build a machine that did something simple like cut a fruit in half or open a box. That simple process was deliberately and pointedly complicated through over a dozen steps—pulleys, marbles rolling down tracks, things falling over, balloons popping. That’s what Rube Goldberg Machines are supposed to do. It is satire on modern life.

Teams wrote manuals explaining how their machine worked and why. Then they demonstrated their accomplishment for an audience. They were given a couple tries to get the entire string of operations to work properly and chop their fruit or squeeze a lemon. It was a big deal, students, parents, and community members came to watch in the evening, judges ruled, and a member of the Rube Goldberg family handed over the honors to the winners. I do not remember what the prize was, other than bragging rights.

“A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a machine intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way. Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal.”

—Wikipedia

This class project involving teams explains why, over the years, I have continued to look for and enjoy Rube Goldberg Machines. My brother was doing this at least thirty years ago. Today, if you search online, you’ll find lots of information about Rube Goldberg Machines and competitions as well as the same thing done under different names in other nations. We all enjoy a pointless effort just for fun.

In the machine below, the goals is to pour glasses of lemonade. At nine minutes, it is incredible, absurdly lengthy, often funny, and the work of a six-person team.

Truly, you do want to watch this. It is ridiculous fun.