Incredible(ly useless) Machines

April 16, 2003 11:00 AM

This brilliant Honda ad belongs to a great lineage of similarly complex and useless contraptions. Perhaps the fascination began with Rube Goldberg, a failed engineer turned illustrator, whose drawings were published in daily papers across the nation throughout the 50s and 60s.

Today, college campuses across the country host annual "Rube Goldberg" contests, hobbyists obsess over building more and more complicated Goldberg machines, a series of video games have been produced that allow you to build your own, and one particularly genius contraption even enjoyed a theatrical release.
posted by Pinwheel (1 comment total)

Fascinating work - I first saw this a week ago with a note saying it had taken upwards of 600 takes to get it right, and there was only one instance of computer animation in the whole thing. I'm not sure how true that all is, but the only thing that bugs me about the entire piece is the tires rolling uphill - otherwise, neat-o.
posted by phong3d at 11:05 AM on April 16, 2003