Jennifer George celebrates her grandfather's career in 'The Art of Rube Goldberg.'

Has the world finally caught up with Rube Goldberg?

As daily life gets more complicated -- just how many steps does it take to activate a cellphone these days? -- the mechanized whimsy of Goldberg's crazed contraptions seems more relevant than ever.

In nearly 50,000 cartoons over a 72-year career, newspaper cartoonist Goldberg (1883-1970), found the long way around for every task imaginable, creating inventions so insane that the term Rube Goldberg Machine made it into the dictionary.

Want to wipe your chin while slurping soup? Simply attach your spoon to a string which, when tugged, flips a cracker to a hungry parrot, igniting a cigar that launches a rocket to sever a cord, releasing a napkin on a pendulum that gently wipes your chin.

"Rube Goldberg's goal was to find the hardest way possible to make something simple happen,'' says game designer David Fox, who has designed an app called Rube Works. "He's part of the culture, an adjective for the outrageous.''

Now there are annual Rube Goldberg Machine challenges where college students compete to perform basic tasks such as "water a plant" or "change a lightbulb'' using at least 20 steps.

A recent video ad for GoldieBlox, a toy company, went viral depicting three little girls setting off a giant Rube Goldberg machine made of dolls, wheels and blocks, all as they sing defiantly, "We want to use our brains.''

And the roots of Goldberg's genius are captured most vividly in The Art of Rube Goldberg (Abrams, hardcover, 192 pages, $60), a definitive career retrospective assembled by his granddaughter, Jennifer George, a jewelry and clothing designer from New York City. In an interview, her eyes glow at the thought of her inventive grandfather.

"He was always the center of attention. He would have loved this,'' says George, who spent seven years on the project to bring Goldberg's work to a new audience. "He'd be thrilled that his work made it into the 21st century.''

The coffee table book, including an ingenious and fully operating Rube Goldberg Machine done in paper cutouts and tabs, mashes up appreciations with hundreds of Goldberg's best contraptions, paintings, political cartoons and sculptures. Contributors include MAD Magazine's Al Jaffee, the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik and cartoon historian Brian Walker.

"Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, and Rube Goldberg was one of my giants,'' says Jaffee, who at 92 still draws MAD's popular back-of-the-book "fold-in" feature, which he says was inspired by Goldberg.

"I just know kids are going to go crazy for a new Rube Goldberg book,'' Jaffee says. "Kids love the interactivity.''

One such kid, three-time National Magazine Award winner Gopnik, writes affectionately that "my introduction was Mouse Trap, the Goldberg-inspired board game from Ideal.''

Brian Walker, whose father Mort Walker created Beetle Bailey, says Goldberg "was not regarded as a great master of the art form, but in his day he was the most successful cartoonist in the business.''

Finding the latest Goldberg cartoon in the Sunday funnies was a morning ritual for generations from 1912 to 1964. And so influential was his work that the National Cartoonist Society named its annual award, now in its 67th year, the Reuben.

Soon after World War II, Goldberg won a 1947 Pulitzer Prize, not for his funny machines but for a simple political cartoon showing an atomic bomb teetering on a cliff between "World Control" and "World Destruction.''

Goldberg's "great discovery,'' writes Gopnik, "was that the chain reaction is often more interesting than its end product. ... Atomic bombs, nuclear weapons, are the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine.''

Now there's talk of new games and maybe a reality show based on the Rube Goldberg Machine competitions. The new app Rube Works, Fox says, "makes a Rube Goldberg machine accessible to anyone, where you don't have to spend hours setting up dominoes or handling plastic parts.''

Her grandfather was about gadgets and "controlled chaos,'' George remembers. "No was not a word in his vocabulary. His view was how do you turn that around and make it a yes?

"That's what his cartoons did,'' she says softly. "Make a no into a yes.''

Copyright 2015

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