A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction-type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way. Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal. In the United Kingdom, a similar contrivance is referred to as a "Heath Robinson contraption" after cartoons by the illustrator W. Heath Robinson.