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Deliberately complex contraption

A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way.

Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal.

The design of such a "machine" is often presented on paper and would be impossible to implement in actuality.

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More recently, such machines have been fully constructed for entertainment (for example, a breakfast scene in Pee-wee's Big Adventure) and in Rube Goldberg competitions.

Origin

The expression is named after the American cartoonistRube Goldberg, whose cartoons often depicted devices that performed simple tasks in indirect convoluted ways.

The cartoon above is Goldberg's Professor Butts and the Self-Opera