Accomplishments and Records

Largest Rube Goldberg Machine Lights Up the Holidays

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) achieved fame for his popular cartoons in which he depicted ridiculously complicated machines invented by Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. Devices of this sort are now known as Rube Goldberg machines.

Professor Butts’ invention for putting postage stamps on envelopes — Rube Goldberg, 1929. (Click on image to expand)

What began as Goldberg’s pen-and-ink concepts to amuse the world has evolved into real-world applications. In 2016, the Latvian e-commerce company Scandiweb built a device that has been named by Guinness World Records as the largest Rube Goldberg Machine. The fantastic contraption consists of 412 individual steps and takes ten minutes from start to finish. The whole process achieves the function of switching on a string of Christmas lights.

Watch the machine in action in the following video:


1 reply »

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.