Rube Goldberg in 'Creative Contraptions'

Quintessentially American, Reuben Lucius Goldberg was born on Independence Day, July 4, 1883, in San Francisco, and died on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1970. With no formal artistic training beyond public school art lessons, Goldberg nevertheless showed an early interest in becoming an artist. His practical, Prussian-born father, Max, had other plans, however. Proclaiming that "artists are bums," Max Goldberg steered his son to the University of California at Berkeley's school of mining engineering, where Goldberg graduated with an engineering degree in 1904.

After enduring a detestable six-month job designing sewers for the city of San Francisco, Goldberg was able to engineer a vocation more to his own choosing - he landed a job as an office boy in the sports department of the San Francisco Chronicle. Persistent in his quest to become a cartoonist, Goldberg submitted drawing after drawing to his editor, who would tear them up and throw them away. Enduring this and other newsroom obstacles, such as having his desk nailed shut by prankster coworkers, Goldberg finally got his cartoons published. In 1905, he joined the San Francisco Bulletin.

When the great San Francisco earthquake occurred in 1906, Goldberg reportedly joked that his design work for the city's water system was responsible for the resulting fire. In 1907, he found himself drawn to the larger arena of New York City to pen sports cartoons for the New York Evening Mail. It was here that he developed "Foolish Questions," a popular cartoon series that offered silly answers to annoyingly obvious questions. In one such cartoon from the series, a clueless spectator at a football game asks, "Is he being helped off the field?" "No, Dear," replies her companion, "they're trying out a new dance called 'The Wounded Soldier Limp.'" Goldberg also created "Mike and Ike (They Look Alike)," "Boob McNutt" and "Crazy Inventions" during this period.

In a professional career that spanned nearly 60 years, Goldberg not only created a staggering body of cartoons, but also found time to serve as the founding member and first president of the National Cartoonists Society, which began in 1946. The cartoon he drew for the July 22, 1947, edition of The New York Sun titled "Peace Today" with an atomic bomb teetering on the brink of destruction won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Goldberg not only continued to provide political and social commentary in his later years, he even took up sculpting at the age of 80. He in fact designed the Reuben Award, which is given out each year by the National Cartoonists Society, and drew political cartoons until he turned 81.

According to Rosa Portell, the SMNC curator of collections, Goldberg's "depiction of 'maximum effort to accomplish minimum results' offered a sarcastic counterpoint to the numerous labor-saving devices marketed in the Twentieth Century. Trained as an engineer, Goldberg created a readily recognizable visual language of action and reaction in which birds, mice, monkeys, porcupines and goats set pulleys in motion, springs uncoiled, weights dropped and bells rang, all towards a pre-determined and hilarious outcome. His madcap world was presided over by the likes of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts and was populated by delightfully drawn characters cursed with everyday foibles."

Although his later political cartoons displayed a mordant wit, Goldberg is best known for the zany "inventions" that he penned between 1914 and 1935 at the rate of two or three a week. They employed a fusion of mechanical doodads and the less predictable antics of plants, bugs, animals and the occasional burning candle. Instead of making difficult tasks simple, Goldberg's conveyor belts of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups, rods, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles and live animals culminate in a visual punch line - always delivered with a gentle, good-natured nudge - that we humans overcomplicate our lives every time we try to scratch the technological itch. Yet, Goldberg was no Luddite. His multistep contraptions use electrical fans, irons, typewriters and other labor-saving gizmos, but these are always supporting players in a gleefully convoluted visual chain of foolishness in which frightened rabbits or ravenous fruit flies are just as vital to the end result as the cogwheels and machines.

In one of Goldberg's cartoons from the American collection at Williams College Museum of Art, for example, Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, a perennial character, fashions an idea for taking his own photograph. In 19 steps, set in motion by Butts' own wiggling big toe, a cascading contraption that includes everything from a spring and a hammer to an Arabian midget and trapeze promises to unfailingly snap the picture. In an editorial aside at the end the strip, Goldberg admonishes, "If the picture is no good, don't blame it on the invention. It's the way you look."

In the exhibition, a circa 1930 cartoon delightfully sends up a hyper-complicated take on the old home remedy of having somebody else yank a string attached to an aching tooth. It is titled "Professor Butts evolves his latest painless tooth-extractor in a state of scientific delirium."

Goldberg's son, Mr George, followed his father's footsteps to a different kind of success - as a Hollywood writer, producer and director and on Broadway with Dylan, the 1964 play about the poet Dylan Thomas - by starting out in the mailroom at MGM. Mr George said the extensive collection of several hundred pieces is especially interesting for the series of 100 or so yellow legal pads with his father's sketches of "inventions."

Even his children's surnames were indirectly a Goldberg invention, according to Mr George, who recalled that he and his older brother, Thomas George, an artist, were always being introduced as the sons of the famous cartoonist. "We had no identity of our own," said Mr George. "So Rube said, 'If you're going to have careers of your own, you might as well have a different name.' My brother chose the name Thomas George because he had a friend named George, and I thought if I was going to get into the movie business, that would be an easy name to remember."

As for his father, Mr George said, "I've studied the man at some distance and up close - he drew funny. If you look at his drawings, it just makes you smile. His people were misshapen - they're, well, people, and the same with his animals. Rube's humor was sharp and satirical, but it was gentle and didn't hurt anybody." Were there real-life counterparts to characters like Professor Butts? "It wasn't that obvious, but clearly he drew from life," said Mr George. "He was a great observer of life, and he invented something that nobody did and nobody else can, which is the 'inventions.'"

Goldberg also conceived and designed the Reuben award, which is presented each year to National Cartoonists Society's Cartoonist of the Year at a black-tie event. Past winners read like a Who's Who from the Sunday comics pages - Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Chic Young, Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz, Hank Ketcham, Chester Gould and Scott Adams, among others. Mr George recalled, "About four years before he died, Rube said to me, 'You know, I don't understand why they've never given me the award.' And I said, 'Rube, it's named after you. That would be like them giving the Oscar to a guy named Oscar; You're the guy that did it.'" In fact, Goldberg did receive his own coveted award - in 1967 for humor in sculpture.

It has been some 35 years since Goldberg's death but his "inventions" continue to inspire countless local, regional and national Rube Goldberg machine contents, such as the one that is being conducted on April 5 this year by the Theta Tau fraternity at Purdue University. The task, as always is simple - remove both old batteries from a two-battery flashlight, install new batteries and turn it on - but this has to be accomplished in 20 or more steps

The exhibition at the Stamford Museum & Nature Center recognizes the inspirational nature of Goldberg's work by including a section that showcases designs by four professional Connecticut artists who submitted proposals for works that responded to the characteristics of Goldberg's creations.

For Margaret Roleke of Redding, the exhibition gave her the opportunity to install "Action/Reaction Prototype," a contraption of steel, Plexiglas, foot-operated water pump and colorful ends. True to Goldberg's credo, her transparent box accomplishes nothing, but visitors can enjoy its virtual "splash and bang." "I was going for 'Rube under control - with easy maintenance'" said Ms Roleke.

In another room, artist Ellen Hackl Fagan, Greenwich, exhibits "Embracing Chaos - The Reverse Color Organ," which synthesizes approximately 200 clay board panels with acrylic, enamel, latex, gloss, glitter, plastic caps, copper dust, oil, gel medium, graphite, fossils, push pins, nails and oil with sound that is triggered by passing a video sensor over the artwork. Collaborator Konrad Kaczmarek of New York City explains that the computer hardware and software "reads" the hue saturation and lightness of the active boards and triggers 28 discrete and 53 blended sounds - all prerecorded compositions that he created, combining original works, indigenous music, found sounds and popular music by contemporary artists.

"Someone has suggested that if Michelangelo were alive today, he would be producing music videos. A corollary might be that if Rube Goldberg were still creating today, he would be inventing computer games," says Chris McQuilken, an artist from Ridgefield. With that observation, his trio of computer games - "Mouse Trap," "Alarm" and "Love" - let visitors channel the spirit of Goldberg by dragging computer illustrations of mice, cages, seesaws, balls, magnets, springs and other items to catch a mouse, wake a sleeping dog and get a boy and girl to fall in love.

For Ridgefield artist Alex Isley, creating a machine that would slice his favorite food, cheese, resulted in "The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Cheese," a contraption whose actions are centered around the theme of stinky things. Hence, there are stinky socks, stinky aftershave, stinky animals and even a stinky movie (Gigli). "I thought the result was kind of funny," says Mr Isley. "Then I looked at Rube Goldberg's drawings in the show and came to realize how far I would have to go to be on the same level as the master. He was amazing."

The Stamford Museum & Nature Center is at 39 Scofieldtown Road, three-quarters of a mile north of Merritt Parkway (Route 15), Exit 35, at the junction of High Ridge Road (Route 137). The main building galleries are open from 11 am to 5 pm on Sundays and from 9 am to 5 pm on Tuesday-Saturday through March and on Monday-Saturday beginning in April. For information, 203-322-1646 or www.stamfordmuseum.org.