Purdue Device Gets Lead Out --Eventually

We all know them, people with a knack for turning the simplest tasks into incredibly cumbersome, complex chores--bureaucrats, plumbers, platoon sergeants, editors, whoever wrote the instruction manual for the video recorder.

So it was bound to happen. On Saturday, Purdue University played host to the finals of the national Rube Goldberg machine contest, the first intercollegiate competition to elevate inefficiency to an art form.

The local entry, a team of Purdue technology majors, ran away from the competition with a pencil sharpener that used a toilet float, a fan, a computer graphics plotter, a doll-sized lumberjack and the theme from the movie “Jaws” in a process that took 36 steps to get to the point.

“It’s kind of like working on a Pentagon project,” said Jeff Cottingham, one of the proud winning designers. “We’re all ready to apply for government work now.”

Goldberg, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, became a household name by drawing ingenious contraptions such as back scratchers and fly swatters that did easy things the hardest way possible. They were, in his words, “symbols of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.”

Inspired by that credo, Goldberg machine contests were once--in the 1940s--as much a campus tradition at Purdue and other universities as were panty raids and pep rallies. Interest in such competitions died out in the 1950s, but resurfaced in 1983 when members of the Theta Tau engineering fraternity dusted off an old Goldberg loving cup buried in the back of the house trophy shelf.

Test of Convoluted Minds

Since then, Theta Tau has sponsored an annual competition that pits the most convoluted minds on campus against each other. In previous years, teams of students have done battle with weird machines that set off chain reactions of pulleys, levers, dominoes, toys, ball bearings, model cars and the like to perform predetermined tasks such as pouring water, opening soda cans, licking stamps and cracking eggs.

One year, the winning team devised a 27-step toothpaste dispenser that featured a Hostess Ding-Dong that flew through the air to smack a picture of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, a King Kong doll climbing a model of the Empire State Building and a drill press that finally squeezed dentifrice on to target bristles.

Abuse Principles

“The aim is to abuse all principles of engineering,” explained David Oliver, who served as contest chairman for Purdue’s 1989 campus-wide contest, held last month.

The idea also has spread to other schools with strong engineering programs that now sponsor their own Goldberg contests.

So, although it may have been overshadowed by the NCAA basketball playoffs, teams from Purdue, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Detroit clashed here Saturday to inaugurate what is hoped will become a regular cross-country rivalry.

As sport, there wasn’t much of a contest. The Detroit entry, with an inner works designed largely with cues and balls that were rendered irrelevant when a fraternity pool table was accidentally destroyed at a beer bash, was titled “48 Hours” because that’s all the time its designers spent in putting it together. When it came to the final step--sharpening the pencil--it produced only the dullest of points.

The Wisconsin offering, the Bucky Badger Hydro-Electro-Mechanical All Purpose Pencil Sharpener, was a little more intricate, employing a beer can, a chemistry book, a mouse trap, a toaster and a Smurf. It too failed to get much lead out.

Masterpiece of Sorts

But the Watch-n-Ponder, crafted in over 500 hours of work by a seven-man Purdue team, proved a masterpiece of mechanical misapplication. Kids, don’t try this at home, but here is how it worked:

A student doll, on his way to a test, realizes his pencil is broken. A panic button is pushed, releasing the doll down a ramp. The broken pencil hits a domino chain of Purdue Pete mascot toys, sending them tumbling into a gate that releases a ball onto a track, activating a solenoid switch that pulls a restraining pin that releases another Purdue Pete doll.

A Mouse Trap, Too

It falls onto a ruler that pushes a big Styrofoam pencil skyward, hitting a clothing pin, which releases a rubber band that in turn releases another ball into a funnel, tripping a mouse trap. That pulls a plug out of a tub, releasing water and lowering a toilet float, which knocks a pencil truck down a hill to a loading dock. That activates a switch which turns on a computerized plotter that prints “Rube Goldberg” on drafting paper and then grabs a special pen, which pulls a string setting a lumberjack doll in a Purdue T-shirt in motion.

He chops down a tree, which, as it falls, activates a switch that turns on a motor that pulls the tree into a miniature lumber mill. Once inside, it hits a switch that activates a cassette deck, which plays mill noises, and a fan, which blows wood chips out of the mill. Once the tape senses a special tone, it activates another motor that slowly pulls an unsharpened pencil out of the mill while another tape plays the theme from “Jaws.”

Finally, the pencil is pulled into the electric sharpener, activating it when it reaches a certain depth and deactivating it and reversing direction on the pulleys when it reaches another depth. Once sharpened, the pencil falls through a series of guides into the outstretched hands of the original student doll.

And who said America had lost its competitive edge?