<![CDATA[Largest Rube Goldberg Machine Lights Up the Holidays]]>

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) achieved fame for his popular cartoons in which he depicted ridiculously complicated machines invented by Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. Devices of this sort are now known as Rube Goldberg machines.

*Professor Butts’ invention for putting postage stamps on envelopes — Rube Goldberg, 1929.* (Click on image to expand)

What began as Goldberg’s pen-and-ink concepts to amuse the world has evolved into real-world applications. In 2016, the Latvian e-commerce company Scandiweb built a device that has been named by Guinness World Records as the largest Rube Goldberg Machine. The fantastic contraption consists of 412 individual steps and takes ten minutes from start to finish. The whole process achieves the function of switching on a string of Christmas lights.

Watch the machine in action in the following video: