Fig 1. The self-operating napkin (September 1931) \’gold,berg\ adjective.
A comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation. — Webster’s New World Dictionary  In the early 1900s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg drew a series of mechanical chain-reaction illustrations in a bi-weekly series called “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts,” which consolidated as…