In 1942, at the New York mansion of the American industrialist John Pierpont Morgan, crowds filed past a large mural titled “Automatic Hitler-Kicking Machine,” which depicted a complex and satisfying contraption involving a cat, a mouse, a stripteaser, and the Führer. It was the first solo exhibition of the inventor and cartoonist Reuben Lucius “Rube” Goldberg, who was, by then, already famous for designing overly complicated machines that fixed everyday problems with wit and madness. A decade earlier, in 1931, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary had listed “Rube Goldberg” as an adjective, defining it as “accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply.”

Goldberg’s carefully designed machines employed birds, monkeys, springs, pulleys, feathers, fingers, rockets, and other animate or inanimate tools to create intricate chain reactions that completed basic tasks like hiding a gravy stain, lighting a cigar while driving fifty miles an hour, or fishing an olive out of a long-necked bottle. As Goldberg himself put it, his cartoon inventions were a “symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.”

Born in San Francisco on July 4, 1883, Goldberg’s only formal art training was with a sign painter as an adolescent. But as much as he loved to draw, he took his father’s advice and earned a degree in mining engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. There, Frederick Slate, a professor of physics and analytic mechanics, gave students six months to calculate the weight of the earth using the “Barodik,” a peculiar invention of his own design, assembled with pipes, wires, springs, and other odds and ends. For Goldberg, this was a valuable lesson in how comedy ensues when one combines the deadly serious and the ridiculous.

A terrifying summer shovelling tunnels in a mine two thousand feet underground followed by six aromatic months of mapping sewer pipes and water mains ended Goldberg’s interest in mining engineering. But his schooling directly contributed to the precision with which he designed his convoluted fictional machines and crafted their deadpan descriptions. As Peter C. Marzio noted in his biography of Goldberg, “Rube labored through thousands of tiresome calculations to determine the deadweight load for make-believe buildings and mines. It was close, tedious work, with complex diagrams showing vectors of force, stress polygons, and partial loads of stress.”

Not long after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, following some early success penning drawings for San Francisco papers, the twenty-four-year-old Goldberg headed to New York with two hundred dollars and a diamond ring in his pocket—a gift from his father, in case he needed to pawn it to buy a train ticket back home. According to Maynard Frank Wolfe’s “Rube Goldberg: Inventions!,” he was on the verge of selling it when he landed a job at New York’s Evening Mail. In addition to daily sports cartoons, he soon scored a national hit with a series called “Foolish Questions.” (“Son, are you smoking that pipe again?” “No, Dad, this is a portable kitchenette and I’m frying a smelt for dinner.”)

The first of his invention series, involving a seriously corpulent man and an “Automatic Weight Reducing Machine,” was inked in 1914. The inventions, which appeared once or twice a month over the next half century, quickly ensnared the public’s interest. Within a year, his various cartoons, which appealed both to the masses and the upper echelons of the art world, were earning him more than a hundred thousand dollars a year (about $2.3 million in today’s dollars). His strips were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, and could even be found in the pages of New York Dada, published in 1921 by Marcel Duchamp. The Museum of Modern Art also displayed his designs, including a “bait-digger for fishing; an automatic lather brush for barbers; [and] a device for keeping buttonhole flowers fresh,” according to a review of an exhibition in The Literary Digest.

Goldberg eventually landed in Hollywood, in 1930. Contracted by Twentieth Century Fox, his feature script “Soup to Nuts” introduced a trio of comics who would later be known as the Three Stooges. The film’s lead character, Otto Schmidt, was a stand-in for Rube, whipping up inventions such as a self-tipping hat and an anti-burglar device that hits intruders on the head, kicks them outside and down a chute, and eventually triggers a cat, which pulls a string and pours water on the home’s inhabitants to wake them.

Goldberg died in 1970, shortly after the début of a retrospective by the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) aptly titled “Do It the Hard Way.” It featured more than a hundred drawings, song recordings, sculptures, and several bigger-than-life Rube Goldberg machines.

In 1995, a U.S. postage stamp honored “Rube Goldberg Inventions” and depicted his iconic self-operating napkin. More recently, an OK Go music video with more than forty million views offered a nearly four-minute master class in the world of Rube Goldberg machining; it involved a circuitous series of ramps, tunnels, wheels, and swinging objects that trigger a crashing piano, flying umbrellas, and other minor disasters, before finally firing paint in the band members’ faces. In annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, groups compete to make the most creative and elaborate contraptions. For instance, a Purdue University team won eight years ago with a hundred-and-twenty-five-step machine that turned on a flashlight by way of a toy rocket, a tiny simulated meteor, and a mock fire.

Goldberg might wonder what all the excitement is about. “People coming into my studio expect me to be hanging from the chandelier,” he once wrote. “It is always a disappointment to them and me, too, that I am a perfectly normal human being.”

Photograph by Charles Tasnadi/AP.

Steven Beschloss is a writer and filmmaker.