We here at Going Green have a special relationship with print and paper, but one of the perennial problems of, say, newspaper reading is that it is often a case of Going Black—your hands, that is, from the ink.
As
this video shows, the problem has been solved in a classic Rube Goldberg-like manner with “The Page Turner.” Don’t try this at home!
Reuben (“Rube”) Garrett Lucius Goldberg was born on July 4, 1883, in San Francisco. Initially pursuing a career in engineering, Goldberg graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1904 and worked for the city of San Francisco as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department. Perhaps feeling that his career was going down the drain, he resigned after only six months to become a sports cartoonist for the
San Francisco Chronicle. He moved to New York City in 1907, and began drawing cartoons for a variety of New York papers, and was syndicated nationally in 1915.
Goldberg drew several cartoon series, but the one that led to his immortality featured schematics of elaborate, comical “inventions” that require a complex series of actions to accomplish very simple tasks. Goldberg died in 1970 at the age of 87, but the term “Rube Goldberg device” lives on. In fact, every year, Purdue University holds a
Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.