Page 46 - Making things move_ DIY mechanisms for inventors, hobbyists, and artists

Chapter 1 Introduction to Mechanisms and Machines 27

The objective of this project is to build a Rube Goldberg machine that cracks an egg in
no less than five steps. This can be done quickly and cheaply with material you find
around the house, but the means to the end is limited only by your imagination and
budget. I’ve included an example in case you’re stuck, but I encourage you to ignore it
and develop your own project. The idea is to get you working with your hands and
making something to accomplish a specific task, without thinking too much about it.

The rules for this project are as follows:

• The majority of the egg and no more than half the shell should end up in the
final receptacle.
• Limit yourself to a 3 × 3 ft area for the entire machine.

• Starting the machine is the only human interaction allowed. For example, this
could be a button press, pushing a toy car over a ledge, or removing a
stopper.

• From the time you initiate movement, your egg must be cracked in 5 minutes
or less.

• Each step, or energy transfer, must be unique and contribute to the goal. For
example, you can’t have a golf ball roll down a ramp, spin five pinwheels, and
then trigger a knife to cut the egg. That’s boring. Also, the pinwheel spins
don’t contribute to the final goal of egg cracking.

I have assigned this project to my students at New York University (NYU) in the first
class for the past few years, and it’s always a hit. My favorite example of a successful
Rube Goldberg machine to date is one that was designed to suck the egg out of the
shell using a large syringe (check out the video at www.flickr.com/photos/fxy/
3260972797/; credit Xiaoyang Feng, Mike Rosenthal, and Ithai Benjamin). You can
browse the student pages from 2008 onward at http://itp.nyu.edu/mechanisms, as
well as the rest of the Internet, to find other examples of Rube Goldberg machines.
I’ve included a simple example here to get you started. So get to work!