Imagine you want to turn on the light in your room. But instead of getting up from the bed and pressing the light switch, you throw a shoe on the floor that knocks over a series of growing wooden blocks. A cord is tied to the last one, which now pulls a pen off the table, causing a ball to roll that hits a book that falls exactly so that it presses the light switch. Voilà, you built a chain reaction machine.
In the United States, they are called Rube-Goldberg machines, after a trained engineer who used his technical knowledge for comics about absurd machines. Here they are called nonsense, nonsense or chain reaction machines. You can find them not only in comics, but also in many books and television programs for children.
In Sesame Street they are called "What-happens-then-machines", for the show with the mouse it is the "egg machine", in the first volume of the Sams book series "Knackwurst-Bring-Anlage" and Petterson from the "Petterson and Findus" "Books actually invent such an apparatus in every volume. What is meant here are machines that consist of many individual parts and in which unnecessary and absurd things happen before they ultimately solve a very simple task.
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