A friend of mine recently posted this video on FB:

Which sent me on a bit of a tangent looking for similar artvid I’d seen years previously by Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss:

These “Mousetrap” contraptions are called Rube Goldberg Machines – needlessly elaborate contraptions build to perform relatively simple tasks, after the American cartoonist and Engineer of the same name. He’s the U.S. counterpart of Heath Robinson, who’s work i was more familiar with. Heath Robinson, incidentally had a WWII code breaking machine named after him, which itself was a direct predecessor to the first programmable digital computer.

Here’s a more domestic themed Rube Goldberg Machine, and of course there’s the Honda Ad.