Pointless machines
Teams will be frantically competing today in an engineering challenge that awards prizes for the clunkiest, most complicated machines that perform simple tasks.
It’s the 12th Annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, held by the Argonne National Laboratory’s at the Chicago Childrens Museum. It is named after the legendary US cartoonist famous for his over-complicated machines that achieved simple tasks in roundabout ways. UK readers would probably describe his imaginations as ‘Heath Robinson‘ contraptions, after another designer of eccentric machinery.
The challenge this year is to make the most complicated machine to squeeze the juice from an orange and pour it into a cup - it must use more than ten steps. I look forward to videos surfacing online next week that show how they did it. In the meantime, here’s a decent Rube Goldberg machine to keep you going.
Also here, and also check out this upgrade too.
Original post by http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/03/pointless-machines.html