Goldberg was a graduate of SF's Lowell High School, earned a BS in engineering at UC Berkeley and, for a time, worked as an engineer for the City and County of San Francisco. But his interest in drawing comics led him to a job at the Chronicle as a Sports Cartoonist.
He moved to New York in 1907 and, while he won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1948, he best known for his "invention" cartoons, like this one: Rube Goldberg's Cure for Oversleeping
I'm certain that these two very watchable TV spots were inspired by Rube Goldberg.
