These Rube Goldberg Mechanisms Will Keep You Guessing as to Where the Ball Goes Next

Have you heard of a Rube Goldberg machine? The contraption is named after an American cartoonist and engineer that devised cartoons featuring a mundanely complicated way to perform a truly trivial task.

These machines consist of a series of unrelated mechanisms, the actions of each triggering the initiation of the next, eventually leading to a final goal. In this video, we see a series of Rube Goldberg mechanisms.

The premise is simple. First, there are four doors that can be opened with a ball passing through. However, the ball starts at the other side of the table and has to go through many obstacles that trigger it to keep changing direction.

The video asks the viewer to guess where the ball is going to end up. It then proceeds to trigger the ball to show where it does indeed head. When the final goal is achieved, there is a small party to celebrate this achievement.

The experiment is repeated with a few gifts to unwrap by triggering a weight to fall, a few appliances to start and even some craters for balls to fall into. The video always leaves you plenty of time to guess what the final outcome might be but we have to say we were taken by surprise every time.