May 31, 2023 • 14 mins
Everyone knows what a Rube Goldberg machine is, but what do you know about the cartoonist who they're named after?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, There's Chuck.
Jerry's here too, Dave Saran Sperre. Let's get going.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Big thanks to stell simonton great name one of the
great house Stuffworks dot com writers. And I am really
thrilled with this one because I had always known about
and heard the term and fully understood what Rube Goldberg meant.
A Rube Goldberg machine is something that is really complex
(00:30):
and kind of awesome, and it's usually some kind of
crazy contraption that ends up doing something very very simply
in a way that's far too complicated than it needs
to be, right. And I know that because it's a
very common term. It's been around since in the dictionary
actually since nineteen thirty one. But I never, until like yesterday,
knew that Rube Goldberg was like a dude and he
(00:55):
was a cartoonist and that's where it came from. He
drew cartoons about these machines.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
It was very popular for it.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, for sure, I guess I knew that already, and
I'm not sure, yeah I did. I think one of
the things my first introduction to Rube Goldberg was that
game mouse Trap.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Remember that of course I have one, and we have
one in Ruby's room.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Okay, there you go. So that was directly lifted in
some ways from Rube Goldberg cartoons. And that must have
been where like the springboard for me, that going into
me in a bathtub, that went down a pole and
dropped me off in a fountain of molasses.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, he had a mouse trap cartoon. It wasn't what
they did in the game, but clearly inspired by that
kind of thing. He did like fifty thousand cartoons. When
I look at his stuff, I'm sure you looked at
a ton of these cartoons. I really like the actual
contraption stuff, not so much to the others, but he
(01:54):
it reminds it was not unlike r Crumb in style
for sure. And I went and looked it up, and
apparently Rube Goldberg is one of quite a few artists
that inspired arkrum So it made sense.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Oh okay, good catch man.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah, it's sort of Arkrummy.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
One of the other little interesting tibits about Rube Goldberg
to get started is his name is the only name
listed as an adjective in Merriam Webster Dictionary. Yeah, and
there are other names listed, but they're altered like Machiavellian.
This is just Rube Goldberg is an adjective to describe
(02:29):
something that is unnecessarily complicated.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Well, your name is the only name that is in
the dictionary as a verb.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Got to clark somebody.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Something Clark me that mousetrap born ging amazing.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I didn't even think about that. You and Rube.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Goldberg, yep, pals forever?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
All right?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
So Rube Goldberg was born Ruben Garrett Lucius Goldberg kincaid,
great name, born on the fourth of July in eighteen
eighty three in San Francisco. And this all makes sense.
He was an engineer. He went to school at cal
(03:08):
Berkeley and got an engineering degree, So you know, it
sort of makes sense that all these sort of contraptions
he drew in these cartoons came from an engineer's brain.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah, I guess he was a cartoonist at heart, at
the very least. His granddaughter who wrote a book about him.
Her name was Jennifer or is Jennifer George. Her book
is the Art of Rube Goldberg. And she said that
what he cared most about was if he made you laugh.
And there's not that much room to do that as
a mining engineer, right, So he spent about six months
(03:39):
after he got his degree he graduated, he spent six
months mapping water and sewer lines and he said, this
is this is not the job for me, and he quit.
It was a pretty well paying job and decamped to
New York, where he took a much lower paying job
at the New York Evening Mail as a cartoonist because
that's what he wanted to do, so he decided to
(04:00):
do it. He was that kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
You know what else he did that kind of knocked
me out. What In the book, his granddaughter talked about
the fact that he was a writer. He was a
sculptor later in life. But he wrote a three Stooges movie.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Oh yeah, that's right before they were well known, and
they were Ted Healy and his Stooges.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It was pre uh, I'm gonna say the wrong stooge.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Curly pre Shemp might have been pre Curly. The original
three was Curly Mow.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
And Larry Okay, I think it was, and then Shep.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Came after Curly, and then you had Curly Joe, and
then you had Joe Besser and then you had, like
the Harlem Globetrotters and Scooba View for some.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Reason, Dare we do one on the Three Stooges at
some point?
Speaker 1 (04:46):
That'd be fun definitely.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Anyway, He wrote the Three Stooges movie Soup to Nuts,
but ended up, like you said, being a cartoonist and
first got his fame drawing a cartoon that was of
the time. It's not so funny now, but they were
called foolish Questions. I did close to five hundred of these,
and one example was it would be a guy that
had just fallen from a tall building on the ground
(05:10):
and a lady comes up and says, are you hurt?
And he says, no, I'm taking my beauty sleep.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
So does it translate?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Is like the funniest thing these days, but it really
does just gangbusters in the early nineteen hundreds of Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
That was one thing he had a knack for was
creating national fads. So people from around the country send
in suggestions for foolish questions, and he wrote I think
he drew five hundred of them. Did you say they're
four hundred.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And fifty yeah, close to it.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
So that was just a kind of like a trait
of his career. He was a nationally syndicated cartoonist almost
out of the gate, and so when he came up
with a new idea, usually just for some reason, struck
a nerve in America just want bonkers for it.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah, that's a good cliffhanger.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Sh Yeah, I think it's a good place for a break.
I don't know if we're hanging on to any cliff here.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
All right, we'll be right back to reveal who the
murderer is right after this.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
So, in addition to foolish questions, he had a whole
plethora of other kind of cartoon inventions, not the cartoons,
about inventions like cartoon characters and strips that he invented,
is what I mean. So there's a I'm the guy
which started another national trend. It would be like, I'm
the guy who put the Hobo and Hoboken. People love that.
(06:46):
I guess it was kind of like the original You
might be a redneck gift or here's your sign or
something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, that was what Fox were they recently, by the way,
in an airport.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Oh, continue, was he doing like a performance or was
he just walking around? No?
Speaker 3 (07:00):
No, yeah, he was performing an airport. He had a
guitar case up and with there's a bunch of change
in there.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Did you say hi?
Speaker 3 (07:07):
No? No, no, I just was like, yeah, you didn't
give him like.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
A low five as you passed him.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
No, okay, I should have. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
So there's the I'm the guy. Another very famous character
was Boob McNutt. I've read some of the Boob McNutt strips,
and I mean they're involved not funny, even like even
if you just kind of take away like the fact
that like one hundred something years have passed, it's just
(07:35):
not that funny. But they're still cute and adorable and
very well done. That's yeah, Yeah, I love the art,
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
So he eventually in nineteen twelve is when he started
these rude Goldberg invention drawings, and these really really took off.
There was one that was used in the House Stuff
Works article as an example. It's that's pretty fun called
the simple Mosquito Exterminator. No home should be without it,
And I'm just going to read it real quick from
(08:05):
Rube Goldberg's own writing. The mosquito enters a window at
a and walks along board which is strewn with small
chunks of rare steak. After munching steak, as he walks,
he's overcome by fumes coming from sponge B, which is
soaked in chloroform, and falls on platform C. When he
regains consciousness, he looks through the telescope D inspires reflection
(08:27):
of bald head E, and there's a guy laying on
the bed bald head in mirror. He mistakes this for
the real thing, jumps off springboard C through D and
dashes his brains. I guess we would say bashes these
days out against the mirror, falling lifeless and can f Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And the reason you kept going through parts of the
alphabet reading that is because these invention cartoons were they
were like schematics, so like each part was labeled with
the letter, and then the corresponding explain nation would say,
you know, A and B and all that. So that
just kind of made it even cooler. And I think,
you know, obviously he had a bit of the spirit
(09:08):
of an engineer still, although the spirit of the cartoon
like really overwhelmed and throttled and ended up strangling the
spirit of the engineer.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, I love this stuff. I looked at these cartoons
all morning. I really really liked them.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
That's awesome. There's another character that he made that I
read was probably his most famous, at least as far
as characters went, Professor Lucifer gorgan Zola Butts and Boobs
right exactly. Professor Butts was based on two different professors
that Goldberg had in college at the mining school. One
(09:43):
was Samuel B. Christi He was the deaning of the
mining school. Another was Frederick Slat he was the head
of the physics department, and he found them both painfully
boring and dry. Apparently, Samuel B. Christie's favorite thing was
to explain what degree you should push a wheelbarrow uphill.
At for maximum efficiency was that kind of guy, and
(10:04):
so he kind of put these two together and created
Professor Lucifer Gorganzola Butts. But from his experience with these
guys with Slate in particular, kind of like esoteric joke
came along that I'm not sure whether he was aware
of or not, but he mentions something. I think he
(10:24):
wrote an essay that was published something called the Barodic
b A R O d I K, which he described
as this incredibly convoluted machine that filled an entire laboratory
that was meant to measure the mass of the earth.
The weight of the earth, I think is the way
he put it. And his explanation were like the only
(10:47):
account of this machine. And some people got kind of
obsessed trying to find like other documentation of this machine.
And as this one guy he wrote an article in
the U See where was he from Irvine?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
From Goldberg?
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Oh oh the college?
Speaker 1 (11:08):
I thought, yeah, he was in a lumb right U
C Berkeley. Anyway, this guy wrote an article called crack
Slate and the UC Berkeley. I guess Blue and gold publication,
I'm not sure. And he talks about like trying to
find documentation and he realizes, like this is this is
a figment generally of Goldberg's imagination. There was a machine
(11:30):
that had a name similar to that, but it was
just a barometer. But he took it and created this huge,
basically enormous convoluted machine in his imagination and inadvertently or
advertently left a historical joke kind of as a time
bomb for somebody to come along and get obsessed with.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Now was that Goldberg or Slate?
Speaker 1 (11:53):
So Slay supposedly had that machine in his lab. Goldberg
was the one who described it and his his s
was the only documentation of it for a while.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Oh okay, okay, I get it now.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, well, it is interesting that, you know, it's funny
to think about these cartoons are just fun and all
that stuff, But people have pointed out over the years that, like,
you know, these are really commentaries that are more relevant
now than they even were back then, which is this
idea that machines many times can come along and mess
(12:25):
things up. Technology can mess things up, like we can
take very simple, elegant processes and make them far more
complicated than they need to be because of technology. And
I think Goldberg was probably poking around at that idea himself,
don't you.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah, Oh, definitely for sure. Well, he was also a conservative,
and he viewed like an increasingly large and cumbersome federal
government that grew up under FDR as like an example
of one of his Goldberg machines, an unnecessarily complicated machine
for carrying out a relatively simple task. Yeah, he was
(12:59):
also political cartoonists too. He won a pulitzer at least
for one or a bulletser, and he also received some
death threats for some of them because they didn't always
sit well with Americans, and he became so concerned with
it he had his family's name changed. So the reason
his granddaughter's name is Jennifer George is because his son
(13:21):
Thomas changed his name to Thomas George, and his other son, George,
followed in Thomas's footsteps and took the name George George.
And Jennifer is the daughter of one of them.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
He was Jewish, and he he would comment a lot
and his cartoons on fascism, on what's going on, and
like you said, didn't sit well with a lot of people.
And we should point out the one he won, the Bulletzer,
was a cartoon in nineteen forty seven that had a
little house balanced on a nuclear missile balanced on a
precipice and it just said peace today. Obviously a very
(13:57):
shaky thing, and he won a bulletzer for that, which
is great.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah. And then one last thing, apparently mouse Trap the
game actually did lift some components of some of his
drawings directly from his cartoons and refused to pay him
any royalties for them. What. Yeah, Marvin Glass was to
blame for that, boo. So there you go, Chuck Bood
Marvin Glass, which, of course means that short stuff is out.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
You Know, Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, There's Chuck.
Jerry's here too, Dave Saran Sperre. Let's get going.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Big thanks to stell simonton great name one of the
great house Stuffworks dot com writers. And I am really
thrilled with this one because I had always known about
and heard the term and fully understood what Rube Goldberg meant.
A Rube Goldberg machine is something that is really complex
(00:30):
and kind of awesome, and it's usually some kind of
crazy contraption that ends up doing something very very simply
in a way that's far too complicated than it needs
to be, right. And I know that because it's a
very common term. It's been around since in the dictionary
actually since nineteen thirty one. But I never, until like yesterday,
knew that Rube Goldberg was like a dude and he
(00:55):
was a cartoonist and that's where it came from. He
drew cartoons about these machines.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
It was very popular for it.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, for sure, I guess I knew that already, and
I'm not sure, yeah I did. I think one of
the things my first introduction to Rube Goldberg was that
game mouse Trap.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Remember that of course I have one, and we have
one in Ruby's room.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Okay, there you go. So that was directly lifted in
some ways from Rube Goldberg cartoons. And that must have
been where like the springboard for me, that going into
me in a bathtub, that went down a pole and
dropped me off in a fountain of molasses.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, he had a mouse trap cartoon. It wasn't what
they did in the game, but clearly inspired by that
kind of thing. He did like fifty thousand cartoons. When
I look at his stuff, I'm sure you looked at
a ton of these cartoons. I really like the actual
contraption stuff, not so much to the others, but he
(01:54):
it reminds it was not unlike r Crumb in style
for sure. And I went and looked it up, and
apparently Rube Goldberg is one of quite a few artists
that inspired arkrum So it made sense.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Oh okay, good catch man.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah, it's sort of Arkrummy.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
One of the other little interesting tibits about Rube Goldberg
to get started is his name is the only name
listed as an adjective in Merriam Webster Dictionary. Yeah, and
there are other names listed, but they're altered like Machiavellian.
This is just Rube Goldberg is an adjective to describe
(02:29):
something that is unnecessarily complicated.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Well, your name is the only name that is in
the dictionary as a verb.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Got to clark somebody.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Something Clark me that mousetrap born ging amazing.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I didn't even think about that. You and Rube.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Goldberg, yep, pals forever?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
All right?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
So Rube Goldberg was born Ruben Garrett Lucius Goldberg kincaid,
great name, born on the fourth of July in eighteen
eighty three in San Francisco. And this all makes sense.
He was an engineer. He went to school at cal
(03:08):
Berkeley and got an engineering degree, So you know, it
sort of makes sense that all these sort of contraptions
he drew in these cartoons came from an engineer's brain.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah, I guess he was a cartoonist at heart, at
the very least. His granddaughter who wrote a book about him.
Her name was Jennifer or is Jennifer George. Her book
is the Art of Rube Goldberg. And she said that
what he cared most about was if he made you laugh.
And there's not that much room to do that as
a mining engineer, right, So he spent about six months
(03:39):
after he got his degree he graduated, he spent six
months mapping water and sewer lines and he said, this
is this is not the job for me, and he quit.
It was a pretty well paying job and decamped to
New York, where he took a much lower paying job
at the New York Evening Mail as a cartoonist because
that's what he wanted to do, so he decided to
(04:00):
do it. He was that kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
You know what else he did that kind of knocked
me out. What In the book, his granddaughter talked about
the fact that he was a writer. He was a
sculptor later in life. But he wrote a three Stooges movie.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Oh yeah, that's right before they were well known, and
they were Ted Healy and his Stooges.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It was pre uh, I'm gonna say the wrong stooge.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Curly pre Shemp might have been pre Curly. The original
three was Curly Mow.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
And Larry Okay, I think it was, and then Shep.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Came after Curly, and then you had Curly Joe, and
then you had Joe Besser and then you had, like
the Harlem Globetrotters and Scooba View for some.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Reason, Dare we do one on the Three Stooges at
some point?
Speaker 1 (04:46):
That'd be fun definitely.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Anyway, He wrote the Three Stooges movie Soup to Nuts,
but ended up, like you said, being a cartoonist and
first got his fame drawing a cartoon that was of
the time. It's not so funny now, but they were
called foolish Questions. I did close to five hundred of these,
and one example was it would be a guy that
had just fallen from a tall building on the ground
(05:10):
and a lady comes up and says, are you hurt?
And he says, no, I'm taking my beauty sleep.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
So does it translate?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Is like the funniest thing these days, but it really
does just gangbusters in the early nineteen hundreds of Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
That was one thing he had a knack for was
creating national fads. So people from around the country send
in suggestions for foolish questions, and he wrote I think
he drew five hundred of them. Did you say they're
four hundred.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And fifty yeah, close to it.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
So that was just a kind of like a trait
of his career. He was a nationally syndicated cartoonist almost
out of the gate, and so when he came up
with a new idea, usually just for some reason, struck
a nerve in America just want bonkers for it.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah, that's a good cliffhanger.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Sh Yeah, I think it's a good place for a break.
I don't know if we're hanging on to any cliff here.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
All right, we'll be right back to reveal who the
murderer is right after this.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
So, in addition to foolish questions, he had a whole
plethora of other kind of cartoon inventions, not the cartoons,
about inventions like cartoon characters and strips that he invented,
is what I mean. So there's a I'm the guy
which started another national trend. It would be like, I'm
the guy who put the Hobo and Hoboken. People love that.
(06:46):
I guess it was kind of like the original You
might be a redneck gift or here's your sign or
something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, that was what Fox were they recently, by the way,
in an airport.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Oh, continue, was he doing like a performance or was
he just walking around? No?
Speaker 3 (07:00):
No, yeah, he was performing an airport. He had a
guitar case up and with there's a bunch of change
in there.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Did you say hi?
Speaker 3 (07:07):
No? No, no, I just was like, yeah, you didn't
give him like.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
A low five as you passed him.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
No, okay, I should have. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
So there's the I'm the guy. Another very famous character
was Boob McNutt. I've read some of the Boob McNutt strips,
and I mean they're involved not funny, even like even
if you just kind of take away like the fact
that like one hundred something years have passed, it's just
(07:35):
not that funny. But they're still cute and adorable and
very well done. That's yeah, Yeah, I love the art,
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
So he eventually in nineteen twelve is when he started
these rude Goldberg invention drawings, and these really really took off.
There was one that was used in the House Stuff
Works article as an example. It's that's pretty fun called
the simple Mosquito Exterminator. No home should be without it,
And I'm just going to read it real quick from
(08:05):
Rube Goldberg's own writing. The mosquito enters a window at
a and walks along board which is strewn with small
chunks of rare steak. After munching steak, as he walks,
he's overcome by fumes coming from sponge B, which is
soaked in chloroform, and falls on platform C. When he
regains consciousness, he looks through the telescope D inspires reflection
(08:27):
of bald head E, and there's a guy laying on
the bed bald head in mirror. He mistakes this for
the real thing, jumps off springboard C through D and
dashes his brains. I guess we would say bashes these
days out against the mirror, falling lifeless and can f Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And the reason you kept going through parts of the
alphabet reading that is because these invention cartoons were they
were like schematics, so like each part was labeled with
the letter, and then the corresponding explain nation would say,
you know, A and B and all that. So that
just kind of made it even cooler. And I think,
you know, obviously he had a bit of the spirit
(09:08):
of an engineer still, although the spirit of the cartoon
like really overwhelmed and throttled and ended up strangling the
spirit of the engineer.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, I love this stuff. I looked at these cartoons
all morning. I really really liked them.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
That's awesome. There's another character that he made that I
read was probably his most famous, at least as far
as characters went, Professor Lucifer gorgan Zola Butts and Boobs
right exactly. Professor Butts was based on two different professors
that Goldberg had in college at the mining school. One
(09:43):
was Samuel B. Christi He was the deaning of the
mining school. Another was Frederick Slat he was the head
of the physics department, and he found them both painfully
boring and dry. Apparently, Samuel B. Christie's favorite thing was
to explain what degree you should push a wheelbarrow uphill.
At for maximum efficiency was that kind of guy, and
(10:04):
so he kind of put these two together and created
Professor Lucifer Gorganzola Butts. But from his experience with these
guys with Slate in particular, kind of like esoteric joke
came along that I'm not sure whether he was aware
of or not, but he mentions something. I think he
(10:24):
wrote an essay that was published something called the Barodic
b A R O d I K, which he described
as this incredibly convoluted machine that filled an entire laboratory
that was meant to measure the mass of the earth.
The weight of the earth, I think is the way
he put it. And his explanation were like the only
(10:47):
account of this machine. And some people got kind of
obsessed trying to find like other documentation of this machine.
And as this one guy he wrote an article in
the U See where was he from Irvine?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
From Goldberg?
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Oh oh the college?
Speaker 1 (11:08):
I thought, yeah, he was in a lumb right U
C Berkeley. Anyway, this guy wrote an article called crack
Slate and the UC Berkeley. I guess Blue and gold publication,
I'm not sure. And he talks about like trying to
find documentation and he realizes, like this is this is
a figment generally of Goldberg's imagination. There was a machine
(11:30):
that had a name similar to that, but it was
just a barometer. But he took it and created this huge,
basically enormous convoluted machine in his imagination and inadvertently or
advertently left a historical joke kind of as a time
bomb for somebody to come along and get obsessed with.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Now was that Goldberg or Slate?
Speaker 1 (11:53):
So Slay supposedly had that machine in his lab. Goldberg
was the one who described it and his his s
was the only documentation of it for a while.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Oh okay, okay, I get it now.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, well, it is interesting that, you know, it's funny
to think about these cartoons are just fun and all
that stuff, But people have pointed out over the years that, like,
you know, these are really commentaries that are more relevant
now than they even were back then, which is this
idea that machines many times can come along and mess
(12:25):
things up. Technology can mess things up, like we can
take very simple, elegant processes and make them far more
complicated than they need to be because of technology. And
I think Goldberg was probably poking around at that idea himself,
don't you.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah, Oh, definitely for sure. Well, he was also a conservative,
and he viewed like an increasingly large and cumbersome federal
government that grew up under FDR as like an example
of one of his Goldberg machines, an unnecessarily complicated machine
for carrying out a relatively simple task. Yeah, he was
(12:59):
also political cartoonists too. He won a pulitzer at least
for one or a bulletser, and he also received some
death threats for some of them because they didn't always
sit well with Americans, and he became so concerned with
it he had his family's name changed. So the reason
his granddaughter's name is Jennifer George is because his son
(13:21):
Thomas changed his name to Thomas George, and his other son, George,
followed in Thomas's footsteps and took the name George George.
And Jennifer is the daughter of one of them.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
He was Jewish, and he he would comment a lot
and his cartoons on fascism, on what's going on, and
like you said, didn't sit well with a lot of people.
And we should point out the one he won, the Bulletzer,
was a cartoon in nineteen forty seven that had a
little house balanced on a nuclear missile balanced on a
precipice and it just said peace today. Obviously a very
(13:57):
shaky thing, and he won a bulletzer for that, which
is great.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah. And then one last thing, apparently mouse Trap the
game actually did lift some components of some of his
drawings directly from his cartoons and refused to pay him
any royalties for them. What. Yeah, Marvin Glass was to
blame for that, boo. So there you go, Chuck Bood
Marvin Glass, which, of course means that short stuff is out.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
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