In the Spring 2010 Issue of California, the theme of which is Truth and Lies, we go searching for Rube Goldberg’s Barodik. What’s a barodik? Well, according to the renowned cartoonist and Cal alum (1904), it was a scientific instrument so involved and complex that it filled an entire laboratory. Moreover, Goldberg said, it was the inspriation for all his famous ‘inventions’ — the cockamamie machines he dreamed up to accomplish mundane tasks. Naturally, we wanted a picture of the barodik for our pages, so we sent our intern Adam Mann to dig one up. What he found was something unexpected.
Read “A Cracked Slate.”
