The 4-year-old Rube Goldberg traced illustrations from a comic American History book. As an 8-year-old, he made line drawings from magazines, newspapers and calendars. He remembered helping a friend deliver magazines and said, "I would literally smell the ink on the pages. The pungent aroma gave me a greater thrill than inhaling the fragrance of the most exquisite perfume." His father did not support his love of drawing and insisted he study engineering. He graduated from University of California at Berkeley in 1904 and began drawing sewers for the city of San Francisco. He lasted only six months and quit his government job to become an office boy in the sports department of a San Francisco newspaper. He submitted drawings and cartoons until he was finally published. He was syndicated and later published in "The Saturday Evening Post."
Rube Goldberg, a trained engineer, commented on how society was becoming more dependent on machines to accomplish daily tasks. He would draw complex cartoons of machines that were designed to complete mundane tasks. A "Rube Goldberg" invention was a contraption of wheels, gears, handles, cups, balls, rods and arms to complete a simple task and make it complicated. One example of his "inventions": "How to get the cotton out of an aspirin bottle."
The 1931 Merriam-Webster's dictionary added the term: "Rube Goldberg." The definition was an adjective, "accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply." This was not the only influence Goldberg had on culture. He was a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society after World War II in 1946. His influence is felt today when The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest (RGMC) brings his cartoons to life by inviting students to create contraptions depicted in Goldberg's drawings. They are challenged to solve a problem using Rube Goldberg's ideas. The "problems" are really simple tasks such as sharpening a pencil, peeling an apple or putting paste on a toothbrush. The student's answer to the problem is a complex invention using as many steps as possible.
In the 1960s, Goldberg influenced board games from his inventions such as Mouse Trap (1960), Crazy Clock (1964), and Fish Bait (1965). According to, "Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers who Created Them," Marvin Glass came up with the Mouse Trap game because he wanted to develop a Rube Goldberg game. The humor of Rube Goldberg was a response to the complexities of life.