Re-discovering Rube Goldberg

Much as we enjoy San Francisco's large fine arts museums, the town wouldn't be the same without its smaller museums. Over the weekend we visited the Contemporary Jewish Museum to see their exhibit of "The Art of Rube Goldberg." 

​Goldberg's drawings ran as comic strips in newspapers when I was a boy. Although he wrote and drew conventional multi-panel cartoons, his name became synonymous with his "inventions." Here's one from the exhibit:

Prof. Butts creates complicated solutions to simple problems. This one is an eleven-step system for putting a stamp on an letter. These were so popular that people took to describing anything that was too complicated as "a Rube Goldberg contraption." 

As the exhibit showed, he wasn't all slapstick. The drawing below, entitled "The Future of Home Entertainment," was a cover for Forbes magazine in 1967 . . . 1967!