Remember the elaborate, warehouse-filling contraption that was the star of OK Go's video for "This Too Shall Pass"? If you got a kick out of that, you'll love the latest, greatest example of mechanical complexity for its own sake created by the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers for Purdue University's annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.
We've posted videos of both machines below for comparison. The first thing to notice is that the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers' contraption takes up a whole lot less space than the sprawling collection of crashing pianos and rolling steel balls in the OK Go machine.
But it's the former that is actually an official, record-setting Rube Goldberg Machine, according to Wired, which spoke with the leader of the 14-person team that built it.
The Purdue team's machine takes 300 steps to blow up and pop a balloon. Taking such elaborate steps to accomplish such a simple thing is, of course, the definition of a Rube Goldberg Machine, named after the famous American cartoonist and inventor who popularized the idea of convoluted mechanisms like his "Self-Operating Napkin" in a series of comic strips published in the first half of the last century.
"One of the biggest challenges is that we are all college students," team president Zach Umperovitch told Wired. "I'm trying to motivate 14 total people to give up their free weekends and evenings, and all it leads up to is a machine that runs three times at a competition. Technically, our biggest challenge was building the steam locomotive engine—it took us 600 hours."
All told, it took the team 5,000 hours over a period of six months to design and build the machine, now the Guinness world record holder as the biggest Rube Goldberg Machine ever built.
Blowing up a balloon and popping it was the specific task set out for entrants in this year's Rube Goldberg Machine Contest at Purdue. Umperovitch and his teammates were obviously able to accomplish that, but they also managed to "incorporate all 24 assigned tasks from previous years" of the contest, he said.
"My rule is to tell an intricate story and make people laugh, and have people sit down and go, 'Wow!'" he told Wired. "Since it was the [competition's] 25th anniversary, I thought, 'Why don't we have a machine that does it all?'"
Here's the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers' record-breaking Rube Goldberg Machine in action:
