Goldberg had answer

Originally published 2 January 1989

Lots of sto­ries in the news late­ly about the per­ils of mega-technology.

Mon­strous­ly expen­sive nuclear reac­tors at Seabrook, N.H., and Shore­ham, Long Island, con­tin­ue to sit idle. The cost of the Shore­ham plant has soared 70 times over the orig­i­nal esti­mate, and now, after 22 years of plan­ning and con­struc­tion, some experts believe the best plan is sim­ply to aban­don the plant.

Three B‑1 bombers have crashed in the past 16 months; the $280 mil­lion plane is so tech­ni­cal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed it seems to have a hard time stay­ing in the air. And, of course, there’s the astro­nom­i­cal­ly expen­sive Strate­gic Defense Ini­tia­tive — Star Wars — a mis­sile-defense scheme of such over­whelm­ing com­plex­i­ty that many crit­ics believe it can nev­er work.

Rube Gold­berg, where are you now that we need you?

Gold­berg was our philoso­pher of tech­ni­cal excess. His loony inven­tions, wide­ly pub­lished in Amer­i­can news­pa­pers from 1914 – 64, helped keep our tech­no­log­i­cal exag­ger­a­tions in per­spec­tive. He is the only Amer­i­can to have his name become a dic­tio­nary word while still alive.

A “Rube Gold­berg” inven­tion uses a ridicu­lous­ly com­pli­cat­ed mech­a­nism to achieve a sim­ple result. Every engi­neer or tech­ni­cal plan­ner with respon­si­bil­i­ty for more than a mil­lion dol­lars of pub­lic mon­ey should be required to read the com­plete col­lec­tion of Gold­berg’s cartoons.

Lap savers and button finders

Con­sid­er Gold­berg’s “Sim­ple Way to Open an Egg With­out Drop­ping It in Your Lap.” When you pick up your morn­ing paper an attached string opens the door of a bird cage. The bird exits, fol­lows a row of seeds up a plat­form, and falls into a pitch­er of water. The water splash­es onto a flower and makes it grow, push­ing up a rod attached by string to the trig­ger of a pis­tol. The report of the pis­tol scares a mon­key, who jumps up, hit­ting his head against a bumper, forc­ing a razor into the egg. The egg drops into an eggcup, and the loos­ened shell falls into a saucer.

Or how about “The New House­hold Col­lar-But­ton Find­er.” A man seek­ing his lost col­lar but­ton plays “Home Sweet Home” on the oboe. A home­sick gold­fish is over­come by sad­ness and sheds copi­ous tears, which fill the gold­fish bowl and cause it to over­flow onto a flan­nel doll. The doll shrinks, pulling a string attached to the pow­er switch of an elec­tro­mag­net. The mag­net attracts an iron dol­lar attached to a thread, lift­ing a cloth that cov­ers a still-wet paint­ing of a dog bone. The dog licks the bone, gets sick from the paint, and goes look­ing for relief. He mis­takes the col­lar but­ton for a pill. When his teeth strike the hard brass but­ton he gives a howl, alert­ing the man to the loca­tion of the miss­ing item.

Goofy inven­tions like these enter­tained two gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­cans and kept us aware of our propen­si­ty for tech­no­log­i­cal overkill. With zany good humor, Gold­berg showed us how to laugh at our fool­ish­ness. If a Rube Gold­berg did­n’t exist, we would have need­ed a Rube Gold­berg to invent him.

The modern dilemma

Gold­berg took a col­lege degree in engi­neer­ing, but car­toon­ing was his life. His biog­ra­ph­er, Peter Marzio, tells us that “despite his con­stant grum­blings against the auto­mat­ic life, Rube loved com­plex machin­ery. He mar­veled at its labor-sav­ing poten­tial, its rhythm, and even its beau­ty. But he also trea­sured sim­ple human val­ues and inef­fi­cient human pas­times such as day­dream­ing and laughing.”

Like most Amer­i­cans, Gold­berg loved and hat­ed machines. Accord­ing to Marzio, he was keen­ly aware of the mod­ern dilem­ma: How can mech­a­niza­tion be intro­duced and used with­out demol­ish­ing the life-giv­ing har­mo­ny between man and his environment?

Gold­berg knew that tech­nol­o­gy grows unwieldy because of our insa­tiable desire for the very lat­est inven­tions, at what­ev­er the cost in mon­ey or frus­tra­tion. He imag­ined an army of “Yokyoks,” tiny green men with long, straight noses and red-and-yel­low gloves, who car­ried an assort­ment of tools and went about foul­ing the works — clog­ging holes in salt­shak­ers, mak­ing pens and faucets leak, blow­ing fus­es, let­ting the air out of tires. Gold­berg warned us against the “gad­get strewn path of civ­i­liza­tion.” The more com­pli­cat­ed our machines become, the more oppor­tu­ni­ties the Yokyoks have to dri­ve us crazy.

We have no short­age of con­tem­po­rary doom­say­ers who rail against the invid­i­ous influ­ence of tech­nol­o­gy in our lives. Rube Gold­berg’s cri­tique of tech­nol­o­gy was effec­tive because it betrayed his unabashed affec­tion for machines, while at the same time expos­ing their trou­ble­some costs. He did not wish to see the tech­ni­cal appa­ra­tus of mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion dis­man­tled; he mere­ly want­ed to make room between the cogs for a lit­tle human fun.

Gold­berg’s inven­tions, for all their bizarre exag­ger­a­tion, served sim­ple human needs, usu­al­ly things ignored by the overblown schemes of gov­ern­ment and indus­try. Find­ing a lost col­lar but­ton. Remov­ing lint from wool. Get­ting gravy spots off a vest. Pre­vent­ing cig­ar burns on car­pets. And Gold­berg did­n’t require megawatts and megabucks to accom­plish his tasks. His machines employed rab­bits, spaniels, old shoes, fire­crack­ers, banana skins, frogs, string, umbrel­las, leaky foun­tain pens, cheese, bal­loons — his tech­no­log­i­cal arse­nal was the stuff of yard sales.

Rube Gold­berg died in 1970 at the age of 87. If he were still alive, we could ask him to design a cheap­er replace­ment for the Seabrook and Shore­ham plants, the B‑1 bomber, and the Star Wars defense sys­tem. A good laugh at the result might help us find our way out of the quag­mire of mega-technology.