Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) understood well the limits of improvement through invention, as a new exhibition of his drawings and cartoons at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco hilariously shows. Armed with little more than a pen and the laws of physics, Goldberg routinely pushed his ideas for inventions to their preposterous conclusions, solving problems that didn’t exist and making the simplest acts of everyday life as complicated as possible. Thus, a contraption worn on the head to wipe one’s lips with a napkin after sipping a spoonful of soup consists of no less than 14 moving parts, most of which must be reset after a single use. That device was memorialized as a U.S. postage stamp in 1995, but an even sillier “appliance” from 1929, concocted by Goldberg’s editorial alter ego, Professor Lucifer G. Butts, could lick a stamp in just 16 steps, with the help of two adults and a dog, of course.
Born on the Fourth of July in San Francisco, Goldberg lived during a time of tremendous technological change. As a young man, Goldberg was part of a generation that came of age as cameras, telephones, and automobiles were becoming commonplace. As an adult, Goldberg joined younger generations in embracing radio, movies, plane travel, and television.
These experiences informed Goldberg’s impractical drawing-board inventions, not so much for the mechanical details he may have occasionally pillaged but for the way in which Goldberg’s pen-and-ink characters blindly trusted their creator’s inventions to improve their lives. Goldberg’s readers, however, were not so easily duped. From the 1920s through 1960s, when Goldberg’s inventions were running in newspapers and magazines—eventually, they were also turned into puzzles and toys—Goldberg’s mustachioed and bald-headed rubes always struck his readers as fools, as ridiculous as someone wearing a pair of Google glasses looked to just about everyone in 2014, except, apparently, Sergey Brin.