View AccountGoldberg, Rube (1883 - 1970)
Rube Goldberg original cartoon artwork
Reuben Goldberg studied Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and found work mapping sewers and water lines for the city of San Francisco. Shortly after starting his engineering career, Goldberg quit to become a sports cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1907 he moved to New York where he began drawing cartoons for the New York Evening Mail. Goldberg became famous for the inventions bearing his name than for his political cartoons. Within his comic strips Goldberg created extremely complex machines that were built to perform a simple task. Beginning in 1912, the hand-drawn diagrams of his outlandish inventions established Rube Goldberg as one of the most popular cartoonists of the time, and the term “Rube Goldberg Machine” was coined. Beginning in 1938, Goldberg added editorial cartoons to his repertoire. “Political cartoons were easier for me than the inventions because they were almost pure idea and the draftsmanship was relatively simple,” Goldberg once said, “I could do two political cartoons a day, but an invention sometimes required a week.” His work for the New York Evening Sun focused on the events in Europe in the lead-up to the Second World War. As the son of a Jewish immigrant from Germany, Goldberg understood the threat of Nazi Germany, and felt passionately about the world’s indifference to the events happening in Europe. During the war, Adolf Hitler became Goldberg’s main point of ridicule. After the war, Goldberg continued to comment on world politics and in 1948 he won a Pulitzer Prize. In the last chapter of his newspaper career, Goldberg left the Sun in 1949 to become a cartoonist for the New York Journal, staying until his last cartoon was published in 1964, when he was 80.
