Chronicle of Higher Education

A burger, untouched by human hand

April 18, 2008

(College of Technology and College of Engineering) --Simplicity is the hallmark of good engineering.

Not so for the designs submitted by seven collegiate teams competing in this year's Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, held at Purdue University. The event has become an annual celebration of engineering inefficiency, where whimsy meets byzantine absurdity.

This year, for the 21st such competition, participants were asked to design a machine that assembled a hamburger, and the team from Purdue won on its home turf for the third time in four years. The 17 students put in more than 4,000 hours building the device, a laborious balance between complexity and reliability.

Purdue's Rube Goldberg machine — Goldberg was a cartoonist born in 1883 who drew comically difficult devices as a lampoon of complex, turn-of-the-century "labor saving" machines — took an around-the-world theme, both beginning and ending in West Lafayette, Ind. The students' contraption kept various objects in motion through 156 internationally themed steps — including King Kong advancing a penny by dropping it off a mock Empire State Building, a replica of Venice flooding in order to cast a ball from a buoyed platform, and, eventually, a burger-compiling conveyer belt.

While there are plenty of ways to make a hamburger (Waffle House, the chain of diners, claims that it offers 70,778,880), the Purdue students had just one in mind for their machine to deliver: a burger with mayo, ketchup, lettuce, and onions.

"This was the hardest theme I've ever encountered," says Drew Wischer, Purdue's captain and a senior in aviation technology who has worked on seven previous such machines (three while in high school). While the $1,000 first prize might buy plenty of burgers to celebrate, he says, the winnings will go toward next year's apparatus.