Mayakovsky biography rube goldberg

Rube Goldberg was a professional cartoonist for over 60 years, the creator of more than a dozen nationally syndicated comic strips, and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning, yet he is remembered at the end of the twentieth century chiefly for one thing—the Rube Goldberg Invention.

Not art, not sex, not just

In various strips over the years he concocted elaborate, multi-part machines to perform the simplest of tasks. These struck readers as extremely apt comments on the overly complicated and often circuitous lives led by just about everybody in modern society. Eventually, Goldberg's inventions earned him a listing in most dictionaries and made his name part of the language.

Rube Goldberg Machine competitions continue to be held in high schools and colleges around America, and Purdue University has an annual National Competition for the best Goldberg variations. Born Reuben Lucius Goldberg into an affluent San Francisco family, Goldberg attended the University of California at Berkeley and majored, at his father's urging, in engineering.

But he was also in on the founding of the college humor magazine, The Pelican, to which he became a contributing cartoonist. By , in spite of his engineering degree, young Goldberg was working on the San Francisco Chronicle, and a year later he was drawing sports cartoons for the San Francisco Bulletin. Soon he moved to New York City to draw for an assortment of newspapers, starting with the Evening Mail, at impressive increases in salary each time he moved to the next publication.

This last-named panel, much imitated over the years, offered rude answers to obvious inquiries—"Q. Did your hat fall in the water? No, I threw it in there for some frogs to use as a ferry boat. Is this number 99? No, mister, it's number 66—we turned the house upside down just for a change. Goldberg began including inventions in his strips, often attributing them to Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, a sort of screwball anagram of his own full name.