SEATTLE—When most Americans think of the dawn of the engineering era, they probably think less of specific devices or factories and more of one pop-culture icon who was obsessed with them: Rube Goldberg.
While his name is synonymous with elaborate contraptions used to enable simple tasks, the early 20th-century cartoonist never actually built any of his world-famous “Rube Goldberg machines.” This irony is thoroughly explored in a new museum exhibit called The Art of Rube Goldberg. Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture (formerly the EMP) has first dibs on the collection’s world premiere. The exhibits tells a story that fans of OK Go music videos and Pee-Wee Herman film sequences might not know: the work of a sports-obsessed cartoonist who struck pop-culture gold with a different kind of sketch.