Rube Goldberg

Rube Goldberg (4 July 1883, San Francisco — 7 December 1970, New York City) was a prolific American cartoonist, inventor, and sculptor, father of Broadway/film producer George W. George, the founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society. He created over 50,000 illustrations and comic strips throughout his career, best known for "Rube Goldberg machines," cumbersome inventions designed to solve mundane tasks in the most inefficient and convoluted way. Goldberg is the only person whose name is an adjective in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary.

Born in a Jewish family, Reuben began drawing when he was four; the only proper lessons he ever took were with a local sign painter. Goldberg's father worked as the San Francisco Police and Fire Commissioner, and he encouraged Reuben to pursue a similar career. In 1904, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an engineering degree and soon began working at the city's Water and Sewers Department. Goldberg quit after just six months and instead became the San Francisco Chronicle's sports cartoonist. In 1907, Ruby Goldberg relocated to New York City and joined the New York Evening Mail in the same role.

The talented illustrator first came to prominence with his comic strip series Foolish Questions in 1908. A rival publisher and newspaper editor, Arthur Brisbane (1864—1936), tried to lure him to join The Hearst Corporation, forcing NY Evening Mail to double his salary and to join the first US publishing syndicate, the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which delivered Goldberg's cartoons to a broader audience; by 1915, he was renowned as the nation's most popular cartoonist, earning $25,000 annually (over $760,000 in today's currency). In 1916, Goldberg created a series of seven short animated films depicting humorous aspects of everyday situations as fictional "newsreels."

His most iconic series of "Goldberg machines," named The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, was published in Collier's magazine between 1929 and 1931; the main character was inspired by Reuben's former professor at UC Berkeley's College of Mining and Engineering, who gave students ridiculous but somewhat legitimate tasks like prototyping a scale that could weigh the Earth. Goldberg worked at The Sun between 1938 and 1949, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his "Peace Today" cartoon, and later at the New York Journal-American until his retirement in 1963.