This Man Is a Professional Useless Machine Builder

when people ask me what i do i kind of sigh because it's like oh god how do i explain this i found the easiest myth is to say i make these machines you know like a ball rolls and hits some dominoes and that pulls a string and it might turn the page of a newspaper via a long chain reaction using everyday objects and then they're just immediately like oh yeah i got it i got it i'm joseph herscher and i make rube goldberg machines a rube goldberg machine it's a machine that does a simple task in an overly complicated way rube goldberg was actually a cartoonist and he used to draw these elaborate machines he was very popular in his time and the term rube goldberg has come to be used to describe any kind of overly complicated mechanism we all kind of recognize these machines because we've seen them throughout cinema and television like pimi's big adventure they have one at the start wallace and gromit is one of my favorites there's one in chitty chitty bang bang all the game mouse traps everybody loves that game the funnest part is just doing the machine no one actually cares about the board game itself i made my first machine when i was five years old i was a machine for storing my candy obviously very useful for a five-year-old but i also noticed it made my parents smile and that's kind of what spurred me on to keep making elaborate devices i lost interest for a good few years while i was a teenager but when i was 22 i discovered these really great japanese machines from a kids tv show my roommates and i got really inspired and we started building this contraption for me it reaworked my childhood passion and i kept building and building and building and that was the beginning of my new career as a professional useless machine builder from joseph's machines on youtube please welcome joseph hirscher joseph since that first homemade machine slowly my machines have got more and more elaborate one of the hardest things i've ever done was a live demonstration on jimmy kimmel that was so nerve-wracking because these machines they don't work every time but they have to when you're on live television i made a machine at the venice biennale that pours water into a plant i had an appearance on sesame street hello i've made many feeding machines i've made a machine to stuff a turkey a sunscreen dispenser a way to lick stamps without having to actually taste them the biggest machine i've created was in a huge postal factory it used 30 slides that were five stories high and it was a machine that slid me into bed it usually takes one to three months to build a machine it's a lot of trial and error and it's learning through observation so i'm watching and seeing how things fail and seeing how they fail is really important because that teaches me how to tweak it i want a certain amount of risk built in if i play it too safe and they work every time then it's going to be a boring machine but if you've got like asparagus flying through the air that's being caught in my mouth then that's miraculous when it works people often ask do you calculate like the physics behind them and work out how things are going to go no way that's so hard can you imagine calculating everything based on the exact angle and air flow like it would be impossible there's too much chaos at this small scale it's much faster to just grab a ball and roll it and see where it hits there is a myriad of ways that i go about creating things let's say i'm i'm trying to connect a to b and i have no idea how to connect it well i'll think what's the theme here they'd say it's a dinner machine so what's some fun dinner objects that i feel like working with butter sounds fun and maybe candles because they can like melt the butter and i allow myself this time to just play and then just see what i discover and what makes me laugh what interests me they discovered this amazing thing where if you put butter on a strip of metal with a candle under it it'll slide down really slowly in this kind of crazy way that ended up being people's favorite part of that machine even though it was never part of the plan i was just trying to get from a to b ultimately i pour so much love into everything that i build that i really care about it working and so i'm just like on the edge of my seat willing it to work and on the 85th take you suddenly get it and it's this magical moment [Music] [Applause] i think ultimately i love the fact that there's this potential for magic and delight and play in the everyday world around us and i think that's what people enjoy watching these machines as well it's this kind of nice moment where everything kind of just fits and connects and the universe feels less arbitrary maybe and making these connections gives me a wonderful sense of like [Music] peace you

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 1,530,858

Rating: 4.9409199 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, new releases, human condition, biography & profile, tech & science, tech, science, biography, profile, Rube Goldberg, Joseph Herscher, machine, machines, construction, creativity, construct, tasks, intricate, creation, contraptions, contraception

Id: lWIGo2FOaJk

Length: 5min 12sec (312 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020