19 Facts About Rube Goldberg

Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg, better known as Rube Goldberg, was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor.

Rube Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in 1948, the National Cartoonists Society's Gold T-Square Award in 1955, and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award in 1959.

Rube Goldberg was a founding member and first president of the National Cartoonists Society, which hosts the annual Reuben Award, honoring the top cartoonist of the year and named after Goldberg, who won the award in 1967.

Rube Goldberg is the inspiration for international competitions known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, which challenge participants to create a complicated machine to perform a simple task.

Rube Goldberg was born on July 4,1883, in San Francisco, California, to Jewish parents Max and Hannah Rube Goldberg.

Rube Goldberg was the third of seven children, three of whom died as children; older brother Garrett, younger brother Walter, and younger sister Lillian survived.

Rube Goldberg began tracing illustrations when he was four years old, and he took his only drawing lessons with a local sign painter.

Rube Goldberg's father was a San Francisco police and fire commissioner, who encouraged the young Reuben to pursue a career in engineering.

Rube Goldberg graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1904 with a degree in Engineering and was hired by the city of San Francisco as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department.

Rube Goldberg's first public hit was a comic strip called Foolish Questions, beginning in 1908.

In 1916, Rube Goldberg created a series of seven short animated films which focus on humorous aspects of everyday situations in the form of an animated newsreel.

Rube Goldberg was syndicated by the McNaught Syndicate from 1922 until 1934.

In that series, Rube Goldberg drew labeled schematics in the form of patent applications of the comically intricate "inventions" that would later bear his name.

From 1938 to 1941, Rube Goldberg drew two weekly strips for the Register and Tribune Syndicate: Brad and Dad and Side Show, a continuation of the invention drawings.

Rube Goldberg won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for a cartoon entitled "Peace Today".

Rube Goldberg moved to the New York Journal-American in 1949 and worked there until his retirement in 1963.

Goldberg's work was commemorated posthumously in 1995 with the inclusion of Rube Goldberg's Inventions, depicting his 1931 "Self-Operating Napkin" in the Comic Strip Classics series of US postage stamps.

Rube Goldberg wrote the first feature film for the pre-Curly Howard version of The Three Stooges called Soup to Nuts, which was released in 1930 and starred Ted Healy.

In 1909 Rube Goldberg invented the "Foolish Questions" game based on his successful cartoon by the same name.