World’s largest Rube Goldberg machine created at Purdue

Over the years, we’ve seen some pretty interesting Rube Goldberg machines. These are machines that use all sorts of things such as water, rolling balls, and other tricks in a series to keep a mechanical machine operating. The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers team has crushed its own world record for the largest Rube Goldberg machine.

The latest machine from the team at Purdue has 300 steps and actually rotates large sections of the machine some points for more steps to happen. All those steps executed flawlessly on the video, and the end result is the inflation of a balloon that is then popped when an articulating hand springs out of a box. I can only imagine how long this machine took to create.

The video is shaky and not so high quality making it hard to see many of the intricate steps that are going on with the machine. I’d wager from the excited shouts of engineering geeks standing around that the team tried to get the machine to work several times without success. Check out the video to see the machine in action.

[via Twitter]