New York Journal-American
What was the name of the employer Rube Goldberg work for from 1949 to 1950?
Rube Goldberg Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg ( July 4 , 1883 – December 7 , 1970 ) , known best as Rube Goldberg , was an American cartoonist , sculptor , author , engineer , and inventor . Goldberg is best known for his popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in indirect , convoluted ways . The cartoons led to the expression Rube Goldberg machines to describe similar gadgets and processes . Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime , including a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in 1948 , the National Cartoonists Societys Gold T-Square Award in 1955 , and the Banshees Silver Lady Award in 1959 . He was a founding member and first president of the National Cartoonists Society , which hosts the annual Reuben Award , honoring the top cartoonist of the year and named after Goldberg , who won the award in 1967 . He is the inspiration for international competitions known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests , which challenge participants to create a complicated machine to perform a simple task . Personal life . Goldberg was born in San Francisco , California , to Jewish parents Max and Hannah ( Cohn ) Goldberg . He was the third of seven children , three of whom died as children ; older brother Garrett , younger brother Walter , and younger sister Lillian also survived . Goldberg began tracing illustrations when he was four years old , and took his only drawing lessons with a local sign painter . Goldberg married Irma Seeman on 17 October 1916 . They lived at 98 Central Park West in New York City and had sons Thomas and George . During World War II , as each of his sons were heading off to college , Goldberg insisted that they change their surname because of anti-semitic sentiment towards him stemming from the political nature of his cartoons . Thomas chose the surname of George , and his brother , also named George , followed suit . In adopting the same surname , George wanted to keep a sense of family cohesiveness . Career . Goldbergs father was a San Francisco police and fire commissioner , who encouraged the young Reuben to pursue a career in engineering . Rube graduated from the University of California , Berkeley in 1904 with a degree in Engineering and was hired by the city of San Francisco as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department . After six months he resigned his position with the city to join the San Francisco Chronicle where he became a sports cartoonist . The following year , he took a job with the San Francisco Bulletin , where he remained until he moved to New York City in 1907 , finding employment as a sports cartoonist with the New York Evening Mail . Goldbergs first public hit was a comic strip called Foolish Questions , beginning in 1908 . The invention cartoons began in 1912 . The New York Evening Mail was syndicated to the first newspaper syndicate , the McClure Newspaper Syndicate , giving Goldbergs cartoons a wider distribution , and by 1915 he was earning $25,000 per year and being billed by the paper as Americas most popular cartoonist . Arthur Brisbane had offered Goldberg $2,600 per year in 1911 in an unsuccessful attempt to get him to move to William Randolph Hearsts newspaper chain , and in 1915 raised the offer to $50,000 per year . Rather than lose Goldberg to Hearst , the New York Evening Mail matched the salary offer and formed the Evening Mail Syndicate to syndicate Goldbergs cartoons nationally . In 1916 , Goldberg created a series of seven short animated films which focus on humorous aspects of everyday situations in the form of an animated newsreel . The seven films were released on these dates in 1916 : May 8 , The Boob Weekly ; May 22 , Leap Year ; June 5 , The Fatal Pie ; Jun 19 , From Kitchen Mechanic to Movie Star ; July 3 , Nutty News ; July 17 , Home Sweet Home ; July 31 , Losing Weight . Goldberg was syndicated by the McNaught Syndicate from 1922 until 1934 . A prolific artist , it has been estimated that Goldberg created 50,000 cartoons during his lifetime . Some of these cartoons include Mike and Ike ( They Look Alike ) , Boob McNutt , Foolish Questions , What Are You Kicking About , Telephonies , Lala Palooza , The Weekly Meeting of the Tuesday Womens Club , and the uncharacteristically serious soap-opera strip , Doc Wright , which ran for 10 months beginning January 29 , 1933 . The cartoon series that brought him lasting fame was The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts , A.K. , which ran in Colliers Weekly from 26 January 1929 to 26 December 1931 . In that series , Goldberg drew labeled schematics in the form of patent applications of the comically intricate inventions that would later bear his name . The character of Professor Butts was based on Rubes professor Frederick Slate at the College of Mining and Engineering at the University of California , where Rube attended from 1901 to 1903 . Frederick Slate gave his engineering students the task of building a scale that could weigh the earth . The scale was called the “Barodik . To Goldberg , this exemplified a comical combination of seriousness and ridiculousness that would come to serve as an inspiration in his work . From 1938 to 1941 , Goldberg drew two weekly strips for the Register and Tribune Syndicate : Brad and Dad ( 1939–1941 ) and Side Show ( 1938–1941 ) , a continuation of the invention drawings . Starting in 1938 , Goldberg worked as the editorial cartoonist for the New York Sun . He won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for a cartoon entitled . He moved to the New York Journal-American in 1949 and worked there until his retirement in 1963 . In the 1960s , Goldberg began a sculpture career , primarily creating busts . Cultural legacy . The popularity of Goldbergs cartoons was such that the term Goldbergian was in use in print by 1915 , and Rube Goldberg by 1928 . Rube Goldberg appeared in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language in 1966 meaning having a fantastically complicated improvised appearance , or deviously complex and impractical . The 1915 usage of Goldbergian was in reference to Goldbergs early comic strip Foolish Questions , which he drew from 1909 to 1934 , while later use of the terms Goldbergian , Rube Goldberg and Rube Goldberg machine refer to the crazy inventions for which he is now best known from his strip The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts , drawn from 1914 to 1964 . The corresponding term in the UK was , and still is , Heath Robinson , after the English illustrator with an equal devotion to odd machinery , also portraying sequential or chain reaction elements . The Danish equivalent was the painter , author and cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen , better known under his pen name Storm P . To this day , an overly complicated and/or useless object is known as a Storm P.-machine in Denmark . Goldbergs work was commemorated posthumously in 1995 with the inclusion of Rube Goldbergs Inventions , depicting his 1931 Self-Operating Napkin in the Comic Strip Classics series of U.S . postage stamps . The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest originated in 1949 as a competition at Purdue University between two fraternities . It ran until 1956 , and was revived in 1983 as a university-wide competition . In 1989 it became a national competition , with a high school division added in 1996 . Devices must complete a simple task in a minimum of twenty steps and a maximum of seventy-five in the style of Goldberg . The contest is hosted nationwide by Rube Goldberg Inc. , a not-for-profit 501 ( c ) ( 3 ) , founded by Rubes son George W . George , and currently managed by Rubes granddaughter , Jennifer George . Film and television . Rube Goldberg wrote the first feature film for the pre-Curly Howard version of The Three Stooges called Soup to Nuts , which was released in 1930 and starred Ted Healy . The film featured his machines and included cameos of Rube himself . In the 1962 John Wayne movie Hatari! , an invention to catch monkeys by character Pockets , played by Red Buttons , is described as a Rube Goldberg . In the late 1960s and early 70s , educational shows like Sesame Street , Vision On and The Electric Company routinely showed bits that involved Rube Goldberg devices , including the Rube Goldberg Alphabet Contraption , and the What Happens Next Machine . Various other films and cartoons have included highly complicated machines that perform simple tasks . Among these are Flåklypa Grand Prix , Looney Tunes , Tom and Jerry , Wallace and Gromit , Pee-wees Big Adventure , The Way Things Go , Edward Scissorhands , Back to the Future , Honey , I Shrunk the Kids , The Goonies , Gremlins , the Saw film series , Chitty Chitty Bang Bang , The Cat from Outer Space , Malcolm , Hotel for Dogs , the Home Alone film series , Family Guy , American Dad ! and Waiting.. . Casper ( 1995 , Brad Silberling ) . Also in the Final Destination film series the characters often die in Rube Goldberg-esque ways . In the film The Great Mouse Detective , the villain Ratigan attempts to kill the films heroes , Basil of Baker Street and David Q . Dawson , with a Rube Goldberg style device . The classic video in this genre was done by the artist duo Peter Fischli & David Weiss in 1987 with their 30-minute video Der Lauf der Dinge or The Way Things Go . Honda produced a video in 2003 called The Cog using many of the same principles that Fischli and Weiss had done in 1987 . In 2005 , the American alternative rock/indie band The Bravery released a video for their debut single , An Honest Mistake , which features the band performing the song in the middle of a Rube Goldberg machine . In 1999 , an episode of The X-Files was titled The Goldberg Variation . The episode intertwined characters FBI agents Mulder and Scully , a simple apartment super , Henry Weems ( Willie Garson ) and an ailing young boy , Ritchie Lupone ( Shia LaBeouf ) in a real-life Goldberg device . The 2010 music video This Too Shall Pass – RGM Version by the rock band OK Go features a machine that , after four minutes of kinetic activity , shoots the band members in the face with paint . RGM presumably stands for Rube Goldberg Machine . 2012 The CBS show Elementary features a machine in its opening sequence . The 2012 Discovery Channel show Unchained Reaction pitted two teams against each other to create an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine . It was judged and executive-produced by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman , known for hosting the science entertainment series MythBusters . The 2014 web series Deadbeat on Hulu features an episode titled The Ghost in the Machine , which features the protagonist Kevin helping the ghost of Rube Goldberg complete a contraption . It will bring his grandchildren together after they make a collection of random items into a machine that ends up systematically injuring two of his grandchildren so they end up in the same hospital and finally meet . Games . Both board games and video games have been inspired by Goldbergs creations , such as the 60s board game Mouse Trap , the 1990s series of The Incredible Machine games , and Crazy Machines . The Humongous Entertainment game involves searching for the missing pieces to a Rube Goldberg machine to complete the game . In 1909 Goldberg invented the Foolish Questions game based on his successful cartoon by the same name . The game was published in many versions from 1909 to 1934 . , the first game authorized by The Heirs of Rube Goldberg , was published by Unity Games ( the publishing arm of Unity Technologies ) in November 2013 .