Let’s say you needed to put toothpaste on a toothbrush. You could just squeeze the tube, but what fun is that? Instead, why not create a magical fantasy land where a water wheel turns a tea kettle over, which wakes up dancing skeletons, which sends an elephant across a battlefield, which causes a dinosaur to trigger a missile, which sets off a volcano of toothpaste to cover a toothbrush dressed up as a medieval wizard?

Not exactly how they teach it in engineering class! But for the students involved in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, that’s exactly the point.

“College is very stressful, no matter what your major is,” said Tim Giannini, a senior in robotics engineering technology and a member of the Boilermaker Rube Goldberg Team. “Bring able to come to the workshop and build something like this is a great stress reliever.”

“We typically come up with the theme first, which this year we decided (for no good reason) was going to be a magic fantasy theme,” said Colby Lee, a senior in mechanical engineering. “Every individual member then gets to dream up their own steps of the machine. Then, of course, we have to put it all together and get it to work!”

Lee and his team of 18 other students spent many hours designing the base of the machine in CAD, working within Rube’s restrictions that the machine’s footprint not exceed 10 feet by 10 feet. But within that footprint, amazing things happen. “The big draw this year is our Magic Missile,” says Lee. “It comes out at the very end from behind the wall, and knocks the tower over. It’s very big, and very risky, but when it works, it’s a lot of fun!”

History of hilarity

The history of Purdue and Rube Goldberg is well documented. The cartoonist Mr. Goldberg never built the machines he illustrated, but some others did. In fact, the 1950 Purdue Debris yearbook describes a contest between Triangle and Theta Tau fraternities, each one building an “infernal machine capable of doing nothing, the hard way.” The contest was resurrected in the 1980s, and by 1989 Purdue began inviting other schools to compete with their machines, judged both by their engineering effectiveness and entertainment value.

“I first heard about Purdue because I saw their Rube Goldberg machine on TV,” said Zach Umperovitch, the National Contest Director for Rube Goldberg, and a Purdue College of Science alum. “I couldn’t believe there were people who were actually doing this! I sought out that team, and within a year I was running the team. A year later we had a national title, and within two years, we had two Guinness World Records.”

Zach turned his passion into a full-time job. He now builds custom chain reaction machines for TV, film, and live events, under the banner of Zach’s Contraptions. He also co-hosts a reality show on the Discovery Channel called Contraption Masters, alongside Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame.

For Zach, getting the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest back to Purdue was a priority. “The contest was really born here,” he said. “It was also my home for eight years. There could be no better place, especially now that we’ve expanded.”

Initially just a contest for university students, Rube Goldberg collaborated with Wonderland Education in West Lafayette to expand its options for students from grades 3-5, grades 6-8, high school, and college. The 2024 contest took place during the same April weekend as the solar eclipse and Purdue Basketball’s trip to the Final Four. Still, hundreds of students made their way to Purdue’s Armory, some from as far away as China.

“It’s inspiring to see the next generation get involved,” said Giannini. “There are so many little kids that have come up, and we get to explain things about our machine to them. As time goes on, maybe those kids decide to come to Purdue and join our team, because they got to see us at this event.”

The 2025 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest task is to feed a pet. The world championships are once again scheduled to take place at the Purdue Armory on April 5, 2025. Interested students should contact the Boilermaker Rube Goldberg Team at boilerrubegoldberg@gmail.com, or attend the callout happening Thursday, August 29 at 7:00 pm in WTHR 172.

“With Rube Goldberg you make lifelong friends, and you get to work in this wonderful collaboration, all working towards this almost impossible goal,” said Umperovitch. “Seeing your project work, there’s this almost indescribable wave of joy, elation, and just a sigh of relief! It’s a camaraderie that’s unique to Rube Goldberg.”

Source: Zach Umperovitch, zach@rubegoldberg.org

Writer: Jared Pike, jaredpike@purdue.edu, 765-496-0374