Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970), better known as Rube Goldberg (/ruːb/), was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor.

Goldberg is best known for his popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. The cartoons led to the expression "Rube Goldberg machines" to describe similar gadgets and processes. Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in 1948, the National Cartoonists Society's Gold T-Square Award in 1955, and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award in 1959. He was a founding member and first president of the National Cartoonists Society, which hosts the annual Reuben Award, honoring the top cartoonist of the year and named after Goldberg, who won the award in 1967. He is the inspiration for international competitions known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, which challenge participants to create a complicated machine to perform a simple task.

Goldberg was born on July 4, 1883, in San Francisco, California, to Jewish parents Max and Hannah (née Cohn) Goldberg. He was the third of seven children, three of whom died as children; older brother Garrett, younger brother Walter, and younger sister Lillian also survived. Goldberg began tracing illustrations when he was four years old, and he took his only drawing lessons with a local sign painter.

In 1911, he built the R. L. Goldberg Building at 182–198 Gough Street, San Francisco, for his widowed father to live in, as well as to collect rental income.

Goldberg married Irma Seeman on October 17, 1916. They lived at 98 Central Park West in New York City and had two sons: Thomas and George. During World War II, as each of his sons headed off to college, Goldberg insisted that they change their surname because of antisemitic sentiment toward him stemming from the political nature of his cartoons. Thomas chose the surname George, and his brother, whose given name was already George, followed suit. In adopting the same surname, George wanted to keep a sense of family cohesiveness.

Goldberg's father was a San Francisco police and fire commissioner, who encouraged the young Reuben to pursue a career in engineering. Rube graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1904 with a degree in Engineering and was hired by the city of San Francisco as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department. After six months he resigned his position with the city to join the San Francisco Chronicle where he became a sports cartoonist. The following year, he took a job with the San Francisco Bulletin, where he remained until he moved to New York City in 1907, finding employment as a sports cartoonist with the New York Evening Mail.

Goldberg's first public hit was a comic strip called Foolish Questions, beginning in 1908. The invention cartoons began in 1912. The New York Evening Mail was syndicated to the first newspaper syndicate, the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, giving Goldberg's cartoons a wider distribution, and by 1915 he was earning $25,000 per year and being billed by the paper as America's most popular cartoonist. Arthur Brisbane had offered Goldberg $2,600 per year in 1911 in an unsuccessful attempt to get him to move to William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, and in 1915 raised the offer to $50,000 per year. Rather than lose Goldberg to Hearst, the New York Evening Mail matched the salary offer and formed the Evening Mail Syndicate to syndicate Goldberg's cartoons nationally.

In 1916, Goldberg created a series of seven short animated films which focus on humorous aspects of everyday situations in the form of an animated newsreel. The seven films were released on these dates in 1916: May 8, The Boob Weekly; May 22, Leap Year; June 5, The Fatal Pie; Jun 19, From Kitchen Mechanic to Movie Star; July 3, Nutty News; July 17, Home Sweet Home; July 31, Losing Weight.