In the ninth grade, Adam Ruben and his friends create a Rube Goldberg machine for a school project.
Adam Ruben is a writer, comedian, and molecular biologist. He has appeared on the Food Network, the Weather Channel, the Travel Channel, Discovery International, Netflix, and NPR, and he currently hosts Outrageous Acts of Science on the Science Channel. Adam is a two-time Moth Story Slam winner, a teacher with Story District, and a producer of Mortified. Adam has spoken and performed at shows, universities, and conferences in more than 30 states and 6 countries. He writes the humor column "Experimental Error" in the otherwise respectable journal Science and is the author of Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School and Pinball Wizards: Jackpots, Drains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball. Adam has a Bachelor's degree from Princeton and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in molecular biology and is the Associate Director of Vaccine Stabilization and Logistics at Sanaria Inc. Learn more at adamruben.net.
This story originally aired on Mar. 2, 2018, in an episode titled “Innovation”.
Story Transcript
They say every science nerd has their day and this was supposed to be our day. It’s a day that we had dreamed of as far back as a year earlier in eighth grade when we took a tour of the high school and some of the kids heard them say things like, “Next year in high school you'll get to go to football games and pep rallies and parties,” but for some of us we heard something different. We heard them say, “Next year you will take ninth grade introductory physical science with Mrs. Newsome, where you will build a Rube Goldberg machine.”
For those of you who don’t know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, it’s a machine that uses vast unnecessary complexity to accomplish a simple task. You've probably seen them in cartoons. A marble rolls down a hill and it lands on a globe and pushes a sailboat and something crazy happens.
I love Rube Goldberg machines. I've been obsessed with them ever since I was a kid, probably ever since I saw that scene in the opening bit of Peewee’s Big Adventure. Remember, the machine makes him breakfast?
There was a kinetic sculpture Rube Goldberg machine in the lobby of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I would stare at that thing whenever we took a field trip there. I used to doodle theoretical Rube Goldberg machines on the paper grocery bag covers of my textbooks while sitting there in class. It was my dream that someday, for some reason, I would have to build a Rube Goldberg machine. And now I was going to have to build a Rube Goldberg machine.
This is not one of those assignments that you procrastinate. This is one of those things where they give it to you a month-and-a-half in advance and the moment I got that assignment sheet I got to work. I started by assembling an elite team of science nerds. It was me, Steve, and Jared.
Just to give you a sense of these guys, I think Jared is best embodied for me in the six words that he said to me when he was my seat partner on the marching band bus trip to Florida. He woke up in the middle of the night from underneath the seat, for some reason, and he looked up and he said, “I have floss up my nose.” And he did. He had dental floss hanging out of his nose. That’s Jared.
I can’t think of anything else that better defines Jared-ness than dental floss hanging out of one’s nose. It wasn’t the sort of thing you questioned. It was just, well, of course. He's got dental floss hanging out of his nose. That’s Jared.
So we got to work in this immediately. Jared and Steve and I, every day after school, every single day we’d go to Jared’s basement and build this Rube Goldberg machine, because we decided that we were not just going to build the best Rube Goldberg machine in the class. We decided we were going to build the Rube Goldberg machine in history.
Our machine was going to simulate nine different natural disasters which were, in order, an avalanche, Godzilla pushing over a building, the sinking of the Exxon Valdez and the occurring oil spill, the San Francisco earthquake, the great Chicago fire, a flood, a volcano made from potassium permanganate, the Tunguska meteorite and, finally, a little ambitious, finally, the greatest natural disaster of them all, the 1993 Phillies who had just lost the World Series thanks to the pitching of someone named Mitch Williams.
So we decided that our friend Pedram was going to represent Mitch Williams. He was going to have his chin down on the machine and, as the final step, a mousetrap was going to spring a pie into his face.
So we were hard at work in this machine for a few weeks when Mrs. Newsome came up to us in class and said, “Hey, I know you guys have already started. I hope you don’t mind taking one more person into your group. Gina doesn’t have anyone to work with.”
Now, we didn’t know Gina that well. She just moved to our school from Vietnam, actually, and she was quiet. She seemed smart, she seemed nice, but would she have the same nerdy dedication to this project that we did? It turned out we didn’t have to worry about Gina. She was actually very creative. She liked coming over to Jared’s house and working with us on a project. We did not have to worry about Gina. We should have worried about Steve.
Somehow, the Rube Goldberg project brought out Steve’s inner pyromaniac. And I don't know why but I remember him sitting there in Jared’s driveway. He'd light a match and use it to light the rest of the pack of matches and he'd throw the whole thing in the corner and just watch it smolder and we’re like, “Steve, get back to work.”
He's like, “No, it’s okay, guys. I bought fifty more packs of matches.” Like that’s not the point.
So we put a lot of time into this machine. Every single day we worked on it. I guess if you think about it it’s because we had time. The other kids were not inviting us to the parties so we had plenty of time to work on the Rube Goldberg machine.
Night before it was due we brought everything out to Jared’s driveway and we assembled the whole thing for our final test run. As we’re setting it up we realize kind of at the same time that, oops, this also happens to be our first test run. Because all the time we spent on this machine we didn’t actually spend it testing the whole machine in harmony. We would just build a piece, figure out that that piece worked and then go use our time to build more pieces. So we had this big sprawling machine that had never been tested from front to back.
And I know exactly what happened during this test run because we have it on video. You can basically watch piece after piece just collapse on the machine. We’re all standing around going, “No, no, no, no.”
You could see Jared standing, “It’s not gonna work, you guys. It’s not gonna work.”
You can hear me running down the driveway yelling, “The adrenaline says it will.”
But we were not going to be dissuaded because this was supposed to be our day. This is what the other kids looked forward to coming out of us. They were never going to cheer for us at a sporting event but they wanted to see this amazing Rube Goldberg machine we were about to produce.
So we get our confidence back, 6:00 a.m. we get up, put everything in the back of Jared’s dad’s truck. We roll into school. Like you've ever seen one of those movies where they want to illustrate that a small group of people is a posse so they have them walking in slow motion? That’s us.
We just roll in like that and all the kids are like, “This is our machine. It has six steps.”
“This is our machine. It has eight steps and at the end it puts a letter in a mailbox.”
“Yeah? Our machine has sixty-one steps. Jared, Steve, bring it in.” And they come in with this massive sheet of plywood with the work we've spent the last month-and-a-half. It’s like a monument to hot glue and kids were like, “Oh, my God. That’s your machine?”
“Well, that’s piece 1-A. Gonna take a few trips to the truck.”
So we set this thing up. It occupies like a quarter of Mrs. Newsome classroom. She lets us go last. By the time it’s our turn, all the kids are gathered around. They're eager to see this thing. We can hardly get near the machine to set it up and make little adjustments and push things down and clip them on and light the candles and tie the little strings, and I have the honor of dropping that first marble.
Dropped the marble, it goes down a wooden ramp, lands in a cup which is attached to a pulley which yanks out a little stick releasing the avalanche. The avalanche falls onto a lever pushing up the other side of the lever pushing over the building. Next to Godzilla that building lands on a lever which has two candles on either side. The candles go up and cut through a piece of dental floss - Thank you, Jared. Very useful contribution - Which drops a fishing weight sinking the Exxon Valdez. But the other candle cuts through another piece of dental floss which reaches all the way across the board holding back a piece of cardboard on four rubber bands. And on top of the piece of cardboard is a scale model of the city of San Francisco.
The city of San Francisco shakes, and sticking out of the city of San Francisco is a nail. Tied to the end of that nail is a small plastic cow, because Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started the great Chicago Fire of 1906 by kicking over a lantern. And that cow kicks over a lantern which is represented by three candles sticking out of a block of wood. And as those candles are falling toward the city of Chicago, I flash back on something that I said hastily while we were setting up and that is, “You’re in charge of the lighter fluid, Steve.”
The city of Chicago goes up in flames. This massive column of fire reaches to the ceiling. I think Steve must have thought, “Well, we’re not gonna need this bottle after today.”
Mrs. Newsome, the always vigilant ninth grade science teacher had been standing nearby with her hand on the fire extinguisher. So before the fireball can singe all of our classmates’ eyebrows off, she unloads this fire extinguisher all over the entire machine and this chalky, yellow dust, which I've since learned is monoammonium sulfate floods the classroom.
It gets in everyone’s eyes and their mouths. Kids are running around the room, “I can’t see.” “I can’t breathe.” “I need water.”
There's a tiny little part of me that thinks, “Well, this wouldn’t have happened if you’d invited us to the parties.”
Nobody has it worse than poor Pedram who had his chin down on the machine. Pie never sprung up but monoammonium sulfate, he got that. He was coughing for a month.
When the dust had literally settled, our machine had stopped, right before the flood which would have triggered the volcano, the Tunguska meteorite. And there was this chalky, yellow dust on top of everything. Even though Mrs. Newsome let us come back later during our planning period to show her that the second half of the machine actually would have worked independently of the first half, the damage was basically done.
I don't know where Gina is today. Jared, I know, has actually abandoned science in favor of the second nerdiest pursuit, clarinet. And Steve, the pyromaniac, is a surgeon. Strangely enough, in Chicago. So don’t get injured in Chicago.
As for me, I became a molecular biologist. I work at a small biotech company making a vaccine for malaria. I like what I do. I like what I’m working on. I think it’s important but I think every scientist has these moments where they just start wondering if they're a fraud. Where they start thinking, “Do I deserve to be here? Is everyone going to look at me one day and realize that I don't have the same feeling about science that they all do?” Because even though I know I love science I know that it’s been a long time since I've felt the way about a science project that I did about the Rube Goldberg machine. And does it make me a bad scientist that I can’t recreate that level of excitement even for what I’m working on now?
But I don't think that’s it. I think the amount of time and enthusiasm I was able to put into that machine, I think it’s just one of those things that you do when you're 14 and you just have so much time. Thanks.