Rube Goldberg Machine - Similar Expressions Worldwide

Similar Expressions Worldwide

• Great Britain — a Heath Robinson contraption, named after the fantastical comic machinery illustrated by British cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, shares a similar meaning but predates the Rube Goldberg machine, originating in the UK in 1912.
• France — a similar machine is called usine à gaz, or gas refinery, suggesting a very complicated factory with pipes running everywhere. It is now used mainly among programmers to indicate a complex program, or in journalism to refer to a bewildering law or regulation.
• Denmark — called Storm P maskiner ("Storm P machines"), after the Danish inventor and cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen.
• India — the humorist and children's author Sukumar Ray, in his nonsense poem "Abol tabol", had a character (Uncle) with a Rube Goldberg-like machine called "Uncle's contraption". This word is used colloquially in Bengali to mean a complex and useless object.
• Spain — devices akin to Goldberg's machines are known as Inventos del TBO (tebeo), named after those that several cartoonists ( Nit, Tínez, Marino Benejam, Frances Tur and finally Ramón Sabatés) made up and drew for a section in the TBO magazine, allegedly designed by some "Professor Franz" from Copenhagen.
• Norway — cartoonist and storyteller Kjell Aukrust created a cartoon character named Reodor Felgen, who constantly invented complex machinery. Though it was often built out of unlikely parts, it always performed very well. Felgen stars as the inventor of an extremely powerful but overly complex car, Il Tempo Gigante, in the Ivo Caprino animated puppet film Flåklypa Grand Prix (1975).
• Australia — cartoonist Bruce Petty depicts such themes as the economy, international relations or other social issues as complex interlocking machines that manipulate, or are manipulated by, people.
• Turkey — such devices are known as Zihni Sinir Proceleri, allegedly invented by a certain Prof. Zihni Sinir ("Crabby Mind"), a curious scientist character created by İrfan Sayar in 1977 for the cartoon magazine Gırgır. The cartoonist later went on to open a studio selling actual working implementations of his designs.
• Japan — "Pythagorean devices" or "Pythagoras switch". PythagoraSwitch (ピタゴラスイッチ, "Pitagora Suicchi") is the name of a TV show featuring such devices. Another related phenomenon is the Japanese art of chindōgu, which involves inventions that are hypothetically useful but of limited actual utility.
• Austria — Franz Gsellmann worked for decades on a machine that he named the Weltmaschine ("world machine"), having many similarities to a Rube Goldberg machine.
• Germany — such machines are often called "Was-passiert-dann-Maschine" ("What happens next machine") for the German name of similar devices used by Kermit the Frog in the children's TV show Sesame Street.
• Czech Republic — such machines are often called "Raketoplán" ("Space Shuttle") mainly in the IT industry describing simple tasks being solved with unnecessary complex and expensive solutions.