I daresay I’m not the first person in the world ever to build an oxcart. I’m sure, however, I was the first ever to build one in the Baltimore metropolitan area.
It was more than two decades ago, when I was in junior high school, that I built my oxcart, and there were a lot of things that argued against my bothering. First of all, given my limited tools and my limited carpentry skill, the cart I could build was only about two feet long, meaning that unless I could come up with some 18-inch oxen pronto, it wasn’t likely that I could actually get anywhere in it. More important, in a peer group as status-obsessed as junior high school kids, boasting that you’re the owner of a spanking new oxcart is slightly less impressive than boasting that you’re the owner of, say, a spanking new Camaro, and I knew that this particular asset was unlikely to win me any new friends.
No, the reason I built my oxcart was less recreational than it was educational. It was during that school year that one of my first science teachers sought to explain to her classes the concept of the machine and to reinforce the point by having each of us build our own. To most people in the postindustrial age, of course, the word machine can be pretty broadly defined, being applied to almost any apparatus that features movable parts, a power source, and an on-off switch and comes in a packing crate filled with enough Styrofoam peanuts to feed a herd of Styrofoam elephants. To the earliest human designers, however, who were too busy dealing with advancing ice sheets and shifting landmasses to worry about inventing the Dustbuster, machines were far simpler things. Essentially, they discovered, a machine is any component or collection of components that transmits power, force, or motion and does so in a predetermined way. With that loose definition, almost anything can qualify as a machine--a lever, a teeter-totter, an axle, or even an oxless oxcart.
Of course, just being a machine does not mean you’re a good machine. Inventors from Edison to Popeil have understood that the most important attribute of any well-designed mechanism is simplicity. The greater the number of parts, the greater the number of ways the machine can fail. After years of trying, I at last gave up any hope of learning how to operate even the simplest VCR the last time I tried to tape the NBA playoffs and wound up with three hours of live programming from the All Polka Channel. Trendy shoppers who rushed to the store to buy cappuccino makers in the 1980s quickly switched to Ovaltine when they opened the box and found an instruction manual only slightly shorter than The Lord of the Rings (Chapter 15: Installing Your Cobalt Fuel Rods).
I couldn’t help thinking about my oxcart when I received my always-welcome invitation to Purdue’s Annual Rube Goldberg Design Contest in Indiana. Rube Goldberg, of course, was an engineer and cartoonist in the mid-twentieth century who, like all talented designers, learned the basic rules of good machine making early in his career and, unlike most designers, spent the rest of his professional life trying to break them. Goldberg was the self-appointed master of the inefficient machine, each week providing newspaper readers with a blueprint for an absurdly complicated device designed to perform an absurdly simple task. In a 1990s market in which Hammacher Schlemmer and the Sharper Image are only one step away from marketing the steam-driven shoe tree and the microchip shrimp fork, such a talent would go wholly unremarked upon, but decades ago Goldberg was hot stuff, featured in hundreds of newspapers nationwide. In 1949, Purdue began the tradition of honoring the popular cartoonist by holding an annual competition in which engineering students from two of its fraternities were invited to design a singularly Goldbergian contraption that performed an assigned task in as complex a way as possible (the contest went national in 1988). The machine that completed the job with the greatest imagination and the least efficiency was named the winner.
