All it took was a few sets of elaborate arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups, rods, balls, boots, cages, bathtubs and a base gel and alcohol mixture and voila! The Penn State Brandywine Engineering Club had a mouse-trap-like contraption that dispensed hand sanitizer all on its own.
It was this over-engineered apparatus that won the club third place in the 2010 Rube Goldberg competition held at University Park. This year's annual contest, named after the famous cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize winner Rube Goldberg, who was best known for his crazy, multi-step inventions, challenged teams to build a machine that dispensed hand sanitizer. Per the Rube Goldberg contest rules, the machine had to complete a minimum of 20 steps in under two minutes, and no human intervention was allowed.
