A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a machine intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way.
Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal.
In the United Kingdom, a similar contrivance is referred to as a "Heath Robinson contraption" after cartoons by the illustrator W. Heath Robinson.
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Rube Goldberg was born in 1883 in the United States and died in 1970. He was most well-known for his cartoons of complex machines that were created to do simple jobs. Click here for further information.
