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The six machines that had qualified for the finals were displayed along the edge of the stage and, to the lay eye, were utterly impossible to figure out. ![]() The Rube Goldberg contest was held in the Elliott Hall of Music on the Purdue campus. #Pop balloon in contraption maker toast time how toTired of seeing America take it on the chin from countries that wouldn’t know how to build a good whoopee cushion if you spotted them the whoop, I decided to visit Purdue and see for myself that the USA could still build the best darn hardy-har hardware anywhere in the world. This year’s competition called for a gadget that could screw a light bulb into a working socket. Since 1983 Purdue University and the Theta Tau engineering fraternity have held an annual contest in which engineering students from around the country invent Rube Goldberg-style machines to perform such tasks as unlocking a lock, sticking a stamp on a letter, and toasting a piece of bread. (Such linguistic homage is a rare honor indeed, granted only by such terms as Stalinist, Orwellian, and the newly coined Clintonesque, which describes the act of running a large country while consuming your own body weight in Pop-Tarts.) ![]() In Goldberg’s era, however, things were simpler, and by the time the cartoonist retired, the term Rube Goldbergian had been enshrined in the language to describe anything characterized by excess complexity. #Pop balloon in contraption maker toast time installIn an era like ours, in which just this kind of technology must be used to install and program a VCR, such cartoons have lost some of their appeal. A typical Rube Goldberg device could not perform a job as straightforward as, say, turning on a faucet without the assistance of pulleys, relays, switches, cables, fulcrums, mousetraps, and, when necessary, actual mice. Rube Goldberg, as you know if you ever opened a Sunday comics section during the first two-thirds of this century, was a cartoonist who became famous for drawing fantastically complicated machines that performed fantastically simple tasks. Recently the country took one more step toward ensuring its technologically frolicsome future, with this year’s edition of the National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. #Pop balloon in contraption maker toast time PcHaving long ago set the global standard for joy buzzer and light- up necktie technology, America has maintained its dominance in the merriment market with such innovations as IBM’s rib-ticklingly disastrous PC Junior and NASA’s sidesplitting blueprints for the space station Freedom. If the United States can no longer build marketable machines, we can still, indisputably, build funny machines. dominance in the exciting field of ballistic vegetables.Īll is not lost, however. In subsequent years more and more American industries fell by the wayside, until, by the 1990s, the only piece of Yankee engineering to lead the world in innovation is the wildly successful SaladShooter, a product that has established U.S. ![]() Most economists agree that the first sign of Yankee decline came more than 20 years ago, with the introduction of the Ford Pinto-a car whose imaginative Blows-Up-When-Hit-From-Behind option proved surprisingly unpopular with finicky consumers-and Chevrolet’s Chevette, a teensy-weensy economy car that doubled as an attractive tie tack. In a global economy becoming ever more competitive, American products have fallen further and further behind the merchandise of most high-tech, cutting-edge countries-like Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Togo, Uzbekistan, and Western Samoa. If you’ve gone shopping any time in the last decade or two, you know that lately Yankee ingenuity has been getting a little less ingenious. ![]()
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