Theta Tau Rube Goldberg Machine Entry

Student-built creation headed to Purdue University for Saturday's national contest

A team of Hofstra engineering students has created a machine that requires 45 steps and incorporates mouse traps, dominoes and marbles to squeeze the juice from an orange as their entry in the national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.

The competition celebrates the complex and wacky creations of Pulitzer Prize-winning artist and engineer Rube Goldberg, (1883-1970), whose "invention" cartoons created incredibly complex machines to perform simple tasks. The machines, which used everyday household items, were Goldberg's way of satirizing the machines that were being built at the time and illustrated his belief that people actually preferred doing things the hard way rather than taking a simple and direct approach to solving a problem.

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