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In this classic drawing, Rube Goldberg gets his think-tank working and evolves the simplified pencil-sharpener. Open window (A) and fly kite (B).  String (C) lifts small door (D) allowing moths (E) to escape and eat red flannel shirt (F).   As weight of shirt becomes less, shoe (G) steps on switch (H), which heats electric iron (I) and burns hole in pants (J).   Smoke (K) enters hole in tree (L), smoking out opossum (M) which jumps into basket (N), pulling rope (O) and lifting cage (P), allowing woodpecker (Q) to chew wood from pencil (R), exposing lead.  Emergency knife (S) is always handy in case opossum or the woodpecker gets sick and can’t work.

    It’s 8 a.m. on a sunny April morning in West Lafayette, Ind. At Purdue University’s Lambert Fieldhouse, teams are warming up for their competition. A large projection screen has been erected so that spectators can catch every detail of the action.
    The Ferris State team, the “Underdogs,” prepare to take on some heavyweight competition. They’re going up against host Purdue, Michigan State University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Toledo.
    At 8:58, just as technicians blare Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” through huge speakers to check the sound system, the Underdogs make their first successful practice run. But they’re not handing off batons or hurtling themselves toward the sand of the indoor long-jump sand pit, which anyway has been roped off.
    Instead, a team member pushes a plunger (A) to create hydraulic pressure, which drops a weight (B), which pulls a string (C) causing a gear (D) to descend down a track (E), which pulls a second string (F) that pulls a clothespin (G) loose causing a caped Bulldog (H) to fly along a wire…which a couple of dozen steps later causes a putter (X) to tap a ball down a miniature fairway complete with sand traps (Y) and fall into a plexiglass box (Z) to vote for “Brutus” as the name of Ferris’ mascot.
    Welcome to the national finals of the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.

Team Work
    Nine College of Technology students comprise the Underdogs – Steve Bar, Matthew Battaglia, Mike Fecteau, Kellie Kulick, Ryan Klunzinger, Justin Terrien, Matthew Tomaszewski, and team co-captains Jason Cook and Tom Sybrandy. The annual competition is named for cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who drew elaborate machines that incorporated many steps to perform simple tasks. The contest embraces the whimsy of Goldberg’s drawings by challenging students to build actual machines.
    While the concept may be whimsical, making a working device takes lots of time and planning to get here. And their teamwork has paid off – while the Underdogs have already had a successful practice run, other teams are still busily assembling their surreal contraptions.
    “We got the ball rolling in terms of the overall design for the machine and constructing the frame back in November,” says Thomas Hollen, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering Technology and faculty advisor. “After that we had to have a theme, so we came up with the Ferris Bulldog and tried to build the ideas on that.”
    For this election year, the teams have been given the task of constructing a voting machine.
    Taking their cue from last year’s campus-wide vote to name Ferris’ bulldog mascot, the COT students built a machine that incorporated 30 different steps (contest rules require a minimum of 20) to cast a ballot for one of four names: Brutus, Woody, Rover or Bowser.
    The machine highlights several of Ferris’ athletic teams. Steps include the flying caped Bulldog performing a slam-dunk with a steel ball, a hockey player shooting a puck and finally a putter tapping a Ferris golf ball into one of four Plexiglas bins with the possible names.
    “The golf course was actually one of the first things we designed,” notes Sybrandy, a CAD Drafting and Tool Design freshman, as the team re-sets the machine for another practice run. “We started at the end and sort of worked backwards from there.”
    The Ferris theme also includes several of the University’s programs: a hammer used to hit a lever that propels the hockey player is from Ferris’ Construction Management program; a nail that when pulled releases a steel ball down a zigzag track comes from the Building Construction Technology program; and a wheel from Heavy Equipment Management selects the golf ball used to cast the ballot.
    That inclusiveness extends to the team itself, with four different COT programs represented.
    “It was fun to watch students from different programs work together,” says Daniel Wanink, associate professor of CAD Drafting and Tool Design and faculty advisor, while eyeing the Underdogs’ main competition – Purdue’s elaborate 71-step machine assembled right next to theirs. “Students from my program worked with Mechanical Engineering Technology students, and Plastics Engineering Technology students worked with the Manufacturing Design students.”
    “It was good to have the different perspectives – it’s been a real team effort,” agrees Cook, a MET senior, securing a small but vital ramp support with duct tape as time draws nearer for their official runs.

Goldberg is born (A), launching unique career (B), inspiring crazy competition (C)
    The man for whom the competition is named was a multi-talented American original.
    Reuben Lucius “Rube” Goldberg was born in San Francisco in 1883. Many of the early cartoons he drew for the San Francisco Chronicle were lost during the infamous 1906 earthquake.
    His greatest fame rests upon his fiendishly elaborate drawings for such things as a self-operating napkin (requiring use of a parrot, sky-rocket and sickle) or a simplified can opener, among whose component parts are a pet fire-breathing dragon and waltzing mice. The Milton Bradley board game “Mouse Trap” has its origins in Goldberg’s fictional inventions.
    Beginning in the 1940s Goldberg concentrated on editorial cartoons, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for a cartoon depicting the delicate nuclear peace that reigned after World War II.
    In addition to his drawings Goldberg is credited with the screenplay for the 1930 movie Soup to Nuts, notable for being the first film appearance of The Three Stooges. In 1945 he co-founded the National Cartoonists Society and was its first president. He died on Dec. 7, 1970.

Demand a Recount?
    As 11 a.m. nears, several hundred spectators take their seats on bleachers overlooking the machines. Some teams are still making final adjustments, especially the University of Texas team, which has driven 19 hours to set-up and run its pirate-themed machine designed in the end to vote for one of two candidates (both named Chad) by hanging one of them.
    The teams get three chances to execute two successful runs with their machines.

Jason Cook, a member of Ferris’ Rube Goldberg team the Underdogs, pauses from his work between runs of their voting machine to give a Bulldog high-five. (Purdue News Service photo/Dave Umberger.)

    The Purdue team goes first. A hand-held video camera projects the image of a metal ball spiraling down a tall wooden derrick at the beginning of a cross-country trek. However, one of the machine’s 71 steps malfunctions and the team elects to void the run, which puts the Underdogs on the stage.
    Holding a wireless microphone, Cook explains the machine’s workings, then co-captain Sybandy pushes the plunger (A) under the name “Brutus” to start the machine.
    And it works perfectly, which it also does on its third run. On the second run a lever (L) fails to release, preventing the hockey player (M) from shooting the puck (N) into the net (O).
    As the judges confer and audience members mill about to get a closer view of the machines, the Underdogs are happy with their performance (“I think we were the only team that didn’t have to touch the machine during a run,” muses Mechanical Engineering sophomore Justin Terrien), but unsure they will best Purdue’s more elaborate machine – even though the Purdue team lost points for having intervened during one of its runs.
    In the end the Underdogs finish second, taking home a trophy and $150 in prize money.
    “Purdue just had a better machine with more steps,” Sybrandy says philosophically. “It was more entertaining.”
    And as the various teams disassemble their machines, packing up components ranging from mousetraps to laptop computers, the Underdogs are already planning an even more Goldbergian machine for next year.