A Not-So-Simple Machine
Student inventors set a world record at a Rube Goldberg machine contest
By Zach Jones | May 3 , 2011
Purdue University’s simple machine used a record-breaking 244 steps to water a single plant.(Purdue University)
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Some of America’s brightest young scientists recently competed to figure out how to water a plant.
Each year, the goal at Purdue University’s Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is to build the most elaborate, complicated machines to perform a simple task, like change a light bulb or dispense soap. This year’s task was to build a machine that could water a plant in as many simple steps as possible.
These complicated machines are actually made up of a series of simple machines. A simple machine is one that adds to the power of a force or changes the direction in which an object can move. Scientists have categorized six different types: lever, wheel and axle, pulley, screw, wedge, and inclined plane. Most of the advanced machines we use today are based on these six basic categories.
The annual competition is named for Rube Goldberg, a 20th-century engineer who became a cartoonist. Goldberg drew funny, complex machines that used chain reactions. His contraptions made fun of inventions that were supposed to save people time and effort but actually took a lot of time and effort to build.
Rube Goldberg machines use different simple machines connected to one another. One simple machine causes the next one to start working, causing a giant chain reaction. Judges for this contest rate inventions based on not only complexity but also creativity and zaniness, in honor of Goldberg’s sense of humor.
Thousands of science students from high schools and colleges all across the U.S. competed this year at the campus in Indiana. Purdue University’s own team spent about 3,500 hours creating their not-so-simple machine. But the 17 students on Purdue’s team decided their invention would do more than just water a plant. Their machine also walks viewers through Earth’s history from the dawn of time.
Pulleys, levers, and many wedges push moving parts through different periods in world history, like the Ice Age, when a tiny caveman spears a woolly-mammoth figurine, all the way to when humans first stepped on the moon, an event represented by a small rocket launching into a white orb.
“This machine has a beautiful flow,” says team captain Zach Umperovitch. “We really tried to keep steps very visible and not hide them.” This year, a team from the University of Wisconsin-Stout won the competition, but the Purdue team set the world record for the number of steps in a simple machine: 244. That’s the most steps ever used in a Rube Goldberg machine, according to Guinness World Records. Umperovitch says of his team’s achievement, “It just kind of happened.”