Building a Better Toothpaste Wringer

To some UC Irvine engineering students, conventional toothbrushing methods are for the unimaginative. Why bother with your opposable thumbs when you can use marbles, motors and mousetraps?

Two small groups of these would-be engineers, each armed with an elaborate, whirring contraption, showed just how complicated squeezing a tube of Aquafresh can be.

They exhibited their creativity Wednesday afternoon at the Rube Goldberg competition, a highlight of the campus’ 30th annual Engineering Week.

The competition -- named for cartoonist Rube Goldberg whose illustrations celebrated needlessly complicated devices performing the simplest of tasks -- this year challenged contestants to apply toothpaste to a brush.

Contestants had a 50/50 chance of winning, because only two teams submitted entries. Impending midterm exams might have kept other competitors holed up in study cubicles or dorm rooms.

The Loose Marbles, a group of three electrical engineering students, walked away with this year’s first place. Their 4-foot-tall machine used a motorized Ferris wheel, marbles, ramps and mousetraps that, on the first run, squirted a glob of toothpaste onto the brush.

The other team’s marble rolled down a small wooden ramp just fine, but never managed to hit the mousetrap and squeeze the paste.

“We actually chose this design because it was more or less flawless,” said Hung Chau, 20, a third-year student with the Loose Marbles.

He said the device was not tested before the run that won his group the $250 prize.

“We envisioned everything working together,” he said. “We didn’t see why it wouldn’t work.”

Boredom during a study session led the group to scribble a pretend Rube Goldberg invention involving animals and fire, said Erica Chung, 20, a Loose Marbles member.

Then they thought it would be fun to build a real one and enter the competition.

“You wouldn’t see a philosophy major solving a problem like this -- they sit back in their armchair and conjecture,” said John Stupar, a professor of engineering ethics at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering. “Just to put toothpaste on a toothbrush is such a simple thing. But to make a contraption that would do that is really ingenious.”

The purpose behind these stunts, he said, is to celebrate “engineering ingenuity.”

Even though the second team’s entry didn’t work despite three tries, second-year computer engineering student Vahe Jabachourian, 19, didn’t seem to mind.

“We did it just for the fun of it,” he said.

Engineering Week, put on by the Engineering Student Council and several other engineering organizations, features four days of events, including a career fair and paper airplane, egg drop and Popsicle-stick bridge competition.