Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor born in 1883 in San Francisco. He is known for creating absurdly complicated machines to perform simple tasks, and in 1931 the phrase "Rube Goldberg" was added to dictionaries to describe such devices. Goldberg had a successful career as a cartoonist, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and created the comic strip "Boob McNutt" among others. He died in 1970 at the age of 87 in New York City.