Gadgetory

we have candy falling into a jack-o'-lantern and a bus it's a ghost which pulls a string which tore his candy into a jack-o'-lantern just about everything that could go wrong with that has gone wrong we have rebuilt that jack-o'-lantern probably dozens of times and every time that we would reset up the Machine something would move like the back wall would tilt just the slightest bit and we'd have to redo it all again that's Rebecca Taraki a freshman at Penn State University and she's in Columbus Ohio for the 2015 Rube Goldberg machine contest college students from all over the country are here to show off the funniest smartest most ingenious contraptions they could come up with and they're pretty serious about it we would work ten to five at the very least every Saturday and Sunday you usually run later than that starting November all the way till now we put in almost 800 hours in the past year we slept about eight hours in the last 48 hours it's been driving and doing this in early mornings and late night hours I've spent 16 18 hour days working on this I think I've like woken up in the middle of the night like oh this is how we can do this and Rodan it down and lots of fun so Rube Goldberg machines were invented by a guy named rib Goldberg they surprised Rube was a famous cartoonist but he was also an engineer in one of his cartoons is about an engineering professor named professor Lucifer Dargan Zola Butz who built the wackiest most complicated machines to do the simplest tasks the competition challenges teams to come up with their own real-world Rube Goldberg machines designed to complete a specific mundane task the objective of the machine this year is to erase a blackboard I think there's a certain amount of people that would just say it's pointless because if the goal is to raise a chalkboard won't you just release a chalkboard we're taking the hardest approach to get there but I think that curiosity in this makes this one oh like really understand how things work and just have fun with it so the rules for the Rube Goldberg competition college nationals are pretty simple your machine has to have a minimum of 20 steps and a maximum of 75 you can't use too many power tools and you get 10 square feet in which to operate but since one of the goals of the competition is to honor rubes cartoons the spirit of the machine is important to they'll judge you on like wins Akala t and use of everyday objects and like laughs barometers so how funny it is my favorite part of the machine is probably the slime it's really fun to watch that one go especially because we have little pink pin that hits the balls and they just roll up which seems impossible but it's just mechanics honestly I would say my favorite part is our turkey destroyer just for the laughs quality at the Penn State competition the emcee was like oh man if there was an award for best turkey destroyer you guys would have it he's not lying it was pretty cool with so many moving parts the machines are delicate to say the least of course building them is one thing but then you have to break them down and move them hundreds of miles and put them back together and pray that they work just getting there with the machine in one piece can be a challenge Iowa State almost didn't get there at all we wrecked the car once it's our second rug it took a lot of fine-tuning of how how much is the right amount when they arrived at the competition the University of Wisconsin team found that the Machine sat a little uneven and it made the Machine behave unpredictably we've had runs something that's run a hundred times perfectly and then all of a sudden it will not work as the wall what what do we do well how do we fix it we change it you know that worked so many times before and it Heather were three times but do we touch it I don't know this year produced Society of Professional Engineers took the first place but that didn't even really matter everyone there was just happy to let people finally see these contraptions they've been slaving over I think also everyone was glad to finally have a reason to goof around with science