March 30th, 2011
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Author: You can’t beat those UW-Stout students for creating absurdly, unnecessarily complex contraptions to accomplish common everyday tasks.
“Westing Estate” (click to enlarge, photo by UW-Stout)
For the second year in a row, a team from the school has won the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, a yearly competition held by the Rube Goldberg Inc. nonprofit with a modest $1,000 prize.
The national contest and nonprofit are named for the cartoonist and engineer whose name is now synonymous with devices that ignore one of engineering’s most important maxims: Keep it simple, stupid.
The Stout team built a haunted Louisiana mansion and surrounding estate featuring “a church, mine shaft, gazebo, gardens, water pump and water wheel, two catapults and about two dozen steel ball tracks,” all designed to water a plant in the most roundabout way possible, according to the university.
Although it won top honors, the “Westing Estate” machine’s 135 steps didn’t perform flawlessly until the students’ third attempt.
Goldberg would be proud, perhaps even misty-eyed. He once said, “I lampoon science because I love it.”
Watch a video of the Westing Estate in action below.
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