Faculty Contact:  Professor Beth S. Wenger  bwenger@sas.upenn.edu

Museum Contact:  Dr. Joshua Perelman  jperelman@nmajh.org

1. Feel free to explore the virtual tour of the Museum’s core exhibition:  https://www.nmajh.org/virtual-museum/
2. View a video made by previous student interns:

In the fall of 2018, NMAJH opened a special exhibition, titled “The Art of Rube Goldberg.”

RUBE GOLDBERG (1883-1970) was a cartoonist, an inventor, and the only person ever to be listed in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as an adjective. Webster’s defines Goldberg's name as "accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply."

Of the nearly 50,000 cartoons he drew in his lifetime, Goldberg is best known for the zany contraptions. These inventions, also known as Rube Goldberg Machines, solved a simple task in the most overcomplicated, inefficient, and hilarious way possible. See image below of the “Self-Operating Napkin:

Image

As they worked on the exhibition, the summer 2018 interns made the video below that showed them turning the entire Museum into a Rube Goldberg Machine.