Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist born in 1883 in San Francisco who was most famous for his cartoons depicting complex machines performing simple tasks. He worked as a sports cartoonist for several newspapers before moving into political cartoons. Though Goldberg did not actually build any machines himself, his cartoons inspired engineers and scientists by depicting elaborate devices that complete tasks in unnecessary ways, and the term "Rube Goldberg machine" now refers to such overly complex inventions.