Don't touch that dial!

Students enter Rube Goldberg machine competition

Students apply the finishing touches to their "contraption."

Forget simplicity. To be winners of this competition, you had to design the most laborious, convoluted, and inefficient way to turn on a radio. The more steps in the process, the better. It was the National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, held in March at Purdue University.

Mississippi State engineering students were among those from eight universities entering the competition, named in honor of the cartoonist who drew humorous machines with complex mechanisms to perform simple tasks.

The assignment: build a machine that used at least 20 steps to turn on a radio. Purdue students emerged the winners, with a 39-step entry called Gluttons for Punishment.

The Mississippi State team, the Turbeaux Dogs, clocked in with 25 steps. Their entry was built around an Olympic theme and covered events that included bob sledding, downhill skiing, the ski jump, figure skating, speed skating, the biathlon, basketball, the 100-meter dash, gymnastics, pole vaulting, and the luge.

"We were the only team that used no mechanized or motorized devices," said team captain James Wink of electrical and computer engineering. He and teammate Ryan Brown, a junior in aerospace engineering, represented Mississippi State at the competition.

To design their entry, the students went back to old Goldberg cartoons and researched his contraptions. "We built our entry using scrap wood, cardboard boxes, hot wheel cars, fishing line, marbles, and mouse traps," Wink said.

The Turbeaux Dogs lost points when they had to intervene to help their mechanism, but Wink is optimistic about next year. "Our concepts were excellent and we think we can edge out competitors the next time we enter," he said.

The students had sponsorship from local industry Kerr-McGee and from the College of Engineering.