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Among the throngs of sailors and servants, we could almost certainly have found a young Jewish kid with an overbearing father and a canted, humane take on human foibles. Long after the 1890s and far away from the city by the bay, he would make a name for himself with a set of drawings that made him the most popular cartoonist of the machine age.2

It’s certainly not much of a stretch to imagine the twelve-year-old Reuben Goldberg participating in the weekly Saturday night parade and happening past a working model of one of the oddest machines he was likely to have encountered on the foggy streets of the city. The Wave-Power Air-Compressing Company was one of a half-dozen concerns that were attempting to harness the waves of the Pacific. And it just so happened to have an office at 602 Market, just a block from the main San Francisco procession. It may have been the sort of place that a machine-obsessed little boy might have found himself wandering on a Saturday night.3

There he might have seen the small model that the company invited the public to come inspect. To the untrained eye, it might have looked like a very complex pier. A float attached to the structure could move up and down freely as the operator raised or lowered the level of water. Atop the pierlike contraption, there would have been a series of pipes containing compressors hooked onto a reservoir for the pressurized air.4 The machine’s inventor guaranteed that “whatever the extent of the perpendicular movement, the pumps take in some air and effect some compression, and thus do some work.” From there, the promoters of the company would have told anyone who cared to listen that the compressed air could be piped to shore, where it could run dynamos to generate electricity.5

Like the other wave motors of the time, the model machine purported to show, step-by-step, how the horizontal or vertical motion of the waves would be converted into usable power for human beings. And always, this seemingly simple transformation seemed to require an inordinate amount of pumps, and chambers, and floats, and levers, and pulleys.6 They seem like terribly serious versions of what has come to be known as Rube Goldberg machines. The adjective derives from an insanely popular series of drawings Goldberg did in the 1920s called “Inventions.” One can now use his name to describe “any very complicated invention, machine, scheme, etc. laboriously contrived to perform a seemingly simple operation.”7

One exemplary Goldberg cartoon shows how to build a better mousetrap, the constant aim of American inventors. In it, a mouse dives for a painting of cheese but instead breaks through the canvas, which lands him on a hot stove, so he jumps off it onto a conveniently located block of ice that is on a mechanical conveyor that drops the mouse onto a spring-loaded boxing glove that sends the mouse caroming into a basket that triggers a rocket that sends the mouse in the basket to the moon.8

There’s a curious resonance between Goldberg’s famous cartoons and the wave motors of the 1890s. In both, there are no black boxes. Every part, in one way or another, has to physically touch every other part. Electronics didn’t exist and dynamos would ruin the fun. But if the classic drawings gently mock the foibles of mad inventors, it’s in the wave motor inventors of fin-de-siècle San Francisco that Goldberg could have seen the dead-serious version of ill-fated mechanical creative obsession.

The group behind the machine might have been delightfully zany to the young Goldberg, too. The company was the brainchild of Terrence Duffy, an inventor who had recently completed a self-published book called From Darkness to Light: Or Duffy’s Compendiums of Nature’s Law, Forces, and Mind Combined in One (1893), which purported to explain all the mysteries of nature through magnetism. It served up wisdom like, “The blood is a magnetic fluid, floating in the tension of the body. The brain is the equivalent to a magnetic or electrical storage battery