honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser

Updated at 8:50 p.m., Saturday, March 31, 2007

Kaua'i student takes honors in inventors contest

Advertiser Staff

A Kaua'i resident was part of a team that second place in the 2007 National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest today.

Ian Esaki, a freshman at Purdue University and a native of Kapa'a, is majoring in materials science and engineering.

In the contest, participants build complicated, whimsical machines that perform simple, everyday tasks.

This year's challenge was to create a contraption that grabbed a whole orange, juiced it, then poured the juice from a pitcher into a cup in a minimum of 20 steps.

The contest honors the late cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

Ferris State University won the competition, which was held at Purdue University.

Esaki and his teammates at Purdue took second place with a machine that paid homage to the James Bond movie "The World is Not Enough."

Their machine was called, "OOJ: The Orange is Not Enough," and it included a "secret agent" who broke into a casino, maneuvered a car and parachuted for a landing.

The contraption took more than 3,000 hours to build.

To see photos of the machines, see news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007a/070331RubeNat.html.