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    COSI Hosts Rube Goldberg College National Machine Competition

    The Nature of Rube

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    As many a physics teacher has explained, a Rube Goldberg machine is a device, or a series of devices, that accomplishes a simple task in the most difficult way imaginable. A typical Rube Goldberg machine will involve gears whirring and strings pulling, marbles rolling down tracks and balloons filling with air. And on Saturday, COSI played host to dozens of Rube Goldberg machines, all of them whirring and pulling and rolling and filling for first place.

    Saturday was the Rube Goldberg College National Machine Competition at COSI, where teams from colleges around the country attempted to prove they had devised the best, or at least the most complicated and whimsical, contraption for opening an umbrella. Each team was required to demonstrate their machine twice, with an eight minute interval to reset the device, in order to prove that it would work more than once.

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    A closeup view of the entry from the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers.

    The irony of every Rube Goldberg machine, of course, is that Mr. Goldberg himself never built a Rube Goldberg machine. Instead he was a cartoonist, who designed wacky and wonderful contraptions that aspiring engineers around the country try to emulate today. One such engineer was Keegan O’Leary, from the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers Rube Goldberg team. This was sophomore O’Leary’s second competition with PSPE; last year they won.

    “Last year…I was a new member, so I was just kind of amazed with the entire experience,” said O’Leary. “The challenge itself was really just deciding what to do and of course once you put your mind to it you can try as many possibilities as possible and it’ll eventually get to where you want it.”

    Built in just three months, Purdue’s machine centers on “a walk down Main Street.” The machine flows through three sections; a general store, a diner, and a park, before finally activating a mouse trap that opens the umbrella.

    Things don’t always go smoothly with a Rube Goldberg machine, of course.

    “We had some hiccups, we had to do a couple of touches, which was unfortunate but with the nature of Rube; the machines are very fickle,” said Penn State senior Greg Risser.

    Risser captained one of the two Penn State teams at this year’s competition, representing both the main campus and the Harrisburg campus. The two teams shared what Risser called a “friendly rivalry,” issuing encouraging chants to one another after each demonstrated their machines; “We are!” “Penn State!” “Thank you!” “You’re welcome!”

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    A closeup view of the entry from Penn State.

    The Legacy

    “There are moments where I literally feel like I’m gonna weep and I can’t keep it together,” said Jennifer George. “I’ll just start crying.”

    George is the granddaughter of Rube Goldberg, and the keeper of his legacy. George’s father started Rube Goldberg, Inc. to keep that legacy alive in the form of contests between teams and schools to see who could built the best Goldberg-inspired contraption.

    The first Rube Goldberg competitions started when Mr. Goldberg was still alive. According to George, two fraternities at Purdue University developed a heated rivalry as they tried to one-up each other building Rube Goldberg machines. But when all the fraternity members graduated, the trophies from their Goldberg battles disappear into an attic. When the trophies were discovered in the late 1980s, the competitions came back into style and spread across the country, orchestrated by Rube Goldberg, Inc. with George’s father and later George at the helm.

    “It doesn’t matter what level I see these competitions, I always get choked up,” said George. “It’s very sweet, and kind of ironic because Rube, even though…they estimate he did about 50,000 cartoons in his lifetime, he’s obviously best known for his invention cartoons, and he never built them. They were never meant to be built.”

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    Crowds gathered at COSI to watch this year’s Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.

    Goldberg was trained as an engineer, so the design specifications in his cartoons were technically sound. But he was also an entertainer, and the necessary elements for some of his designs are not always readily available in real life.

    “Chances are you’re not going to find a chicken who can cry, or an asthmatic flea who can sneeze, those kinds of things,” said George.

    According to George, Rube Goldberg machines fulfill an important purpose in the modern world of ubiquitous technology.

    “I think in this day and age we’re so reliant on our devices, the technology that we live with day-to-day,” said George. “You send a text or you take a photo, but the inner workings are absolutely mysterious to me and most of the population, I have no idea how it really works. But there is probably a chain reaction way of how things go, one thing to the next, to the next…”

    Good Rube Goldberg machines, said George, “come from landfill, they should not contribute to landfill.” Green, recycled machines are always preferable to George, as are those that involve some humor and theatricality. The fact that a Rube Goldberg machine is best made with recycled parts also helps to level the playing field when other engineering competitions require a lot of funding to participate.

    “All you need is a good pile of junk and some imagination and you can compete,” said George.

    The Underdogs

    “I was actually driving home and it was raining, thunder storming. And I had just watched the documentary about Tesla on Netflix…and it totally inspired us,” said Mathew Dentinger. “It was kind of cool that it happened during a thunderstorm.”

    Dentinger’s team from the University of Wisconsin-Barron County constructed a Rube Goldberg machine to honor the life of another great inventor; Nikola Tesla.

    “We tried to make every single step representative of Tesla’s life,” said Dentinger, depicting the inventor’s birth and early life, his immigration to America, his scientific achievements, and his ostracism from the scientific community just before his death. The whole machine took about six months to built, from September to “just about a week ago.”

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    The team from the University of Wisconsin-Barron County watches on the big screen.

    UW-Barron County is a small, two year college in Rice Lake, Wisconsin.

    “It’s not a big engineering school with lots of money,” said Dru Galetka, the team captain. “I think we only had a thousand dollars to build this so, I mean, we engineered around our budget, really.”

    Dentinger made a working, LED-lit Ferris wheel by hand and the whole team sacrificed their Spring Break to make a flock of birds featured in their machine, a project that apparently caused a small rift in the group.

    “We’re over it now,” said Dentinger. “But it wasn’t looking good for a while there. But we got it done.”

    The whole thing was hauled down to Columbus in what Galetka described as a twelve-by-five foot ice shack with no suspension, and yet luckily nothing broke.

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    A closeup view of the entry from the University of Wisconsin-Barron County.

    Team member Jacob Saxinger said his favorite part of competing in Rube Goldberg is getting to meet new people and new teams from all over the country.

    “Being from such a small college, we’re able to really go against some of these other colleges, so that’s kind of a very big part of our experience at this,” said Saxinger.

    “We kind of feel like underdogs, a little bit,” added Dentinger.

    The Texans

    Joanna Boy, the energetic captain of the team from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin, said she hopes competitions like this will help bring back interest in Rube Goldberg machines at her school.

    “It’s kind of died down a little bit, I guess, over at UT, especially since there’s not a lot of like, hype about it,” said Boy. “Up here, up in the North there’s the competition held here, at Purdue they have a big competition, so we’re kind of trying to build it, at least get the energy back up.”

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    Joanna Boy (front) and the team from the University of Texas in Austin.

    Boy is a second-year student at UT, but her team is largely comprised of freshmen. This year, the Texans have built a machine called “Rube, Reduce, Recycle – A Simple Solution to a Complex Problem.” The machine features several environmental themes including littering, pollution, recycling and deforestation. When the machine ultimately opens the umbrella, it does so to protect a model of the Earth below.

    One of the bigger challenges the team faced was just taking everything apart and transporting it to Columbus. Boy said what she enjoys most about Rube Goldberg competitions is the creativity of it, the combination of art and construction that goes into a machine.

    “And then there’s just the aspect about it that’s just generally Rube,” said Boy. “Like, usually your brain doesn’t process things as like…I’m gonna make this thing happen and then I’m gonna store this energy and have it go to the next… then it also just combines the story line, you get to make up fun puns that you want to add to your theme and things like that.”

    “I like solving the problem,” said Justin Tabarini, one of Boy’s teammates. “Because it’s a great feeling, once you’re, like, stuck in something and you can’t do it forever and you just have to keep trying, but once you actually figure out a way to make it work, it works.”

    According to Boy, the environmental theme was the first one the team came up with, and as much as they brainstormed other options, they kept returning to their first idea. The reason, said Boy, was because they wanted to build a machine that had a story and a moral, especially because of Rube Goldberg’s place as a STEM outreach tool, inspiring young people to become engineers.

    “Becoming an engineer isn’t just about…making cool stuff or…crash-testing things, fixing them until they work, but it’s also about…making the world a better place right? And so that’s kind of where we went with our machine,” said Boy. “I think it kind of just like shows off a lot of the great things that come with being an engineer besides just like having fun and making cool stuff.”

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    Jesse Bethea
    Jesse Betheahttps://columbusunderground.com
    Jesse Bethea is a freelance features writer at Columbus Underground covering neighborhood issues, economics, science, technology and other topics. He is a graduate from Ohio University, a native of Fairfax, Virginia and a fan of movies, politics and baseball. Jesse is the winner of The Great Novel Contest and the author of Fellow Travellers, available now at all major retailers.
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