Something for Nothing
Archive.org [host of the mind-blowing Prelinger Archives] brings you this little gem, featuring amazing live-action illustration and animation from Rube Goldberg himself.
Mr. Goldberg touches on the nuances of the U.S Patent Office and goes on to explain the impossibility of designing a perpetual motion machine. In the second half of the the film, an assuring narrator takes over, and comforts the audience with facts about our “virtually unlimited source of power,” namely gasoline.
This pro-petro propaganda is somewhat redeemed in the end, however, by Rube’s contribution of a whimsical hydroelectric/chelonian perpetual motion machine. Definitely worth a download!