Today in needlessly complicated culinary robots: A toy train makes a pizza

It gets a little help in the kitchen from friends like "mini Ferris wheel" and "wind-up ballerina"

By Reid McCarter  |  June 14, 2021 | 7:00pm
Aux Features pizza
Today in needlessly complicated culinary robots: A toy train makes a pizza
We’re not going to write anything about Italian fascists and well-timed trains here, but you’re welcome to think something up yourselves. Screenshot: Joseph’s Machines

One of humanity’s greatest dreams is to have robotic helpers capable of doing absolutely everything for us that we’d rather not have to do ourselves. Take, for example, the automatic sandwich-making machine. Is it quicker than the traditional method? No! Does the sandwich it produce look very good? Not really! But, by virtue of the fact that it’s an unthinking robot producing food for us without much of any outside help, it’s a project that captures the imagination anyway.

It’s within this great tradition of dedicated laziness that we introduce “The Pizza-Making Contraption,” a toy train-driven device made by Joseph’s Machines to create a pizza in the most laborious—but hands-free—way possible.

After getting the machine going by squeezing the first bit of tomato sauce onto a circle of dough, the pizza machine carries on the rest of the way on its own. The wood block spins evenly thanks to the motion of a toy train driving circles around it and, all the while, the bottle of sauce swings above, dispensing the right volume before a comb descends to even it out and a rotating cheese sifter continues the work.

Each bit of the Rube Goldberg machine plays its part as the video continues. A toy ballerina moves a platform so pieces of pepperoni fall onto the pie. The train hooks a ball that sets a toy Ferris wheel in motion so it can drop olives down. Once it’s finished, Joseph bakes the pizza then uses a variation of the train-driven machine to have slices of pizza slammed into his face.

Unfortunately, we can’t see this train-driven pizza chef breaking through to the Italian market, no matter how novel the concept may be. But, considering what other robots are being used for elsewhere in the world, we hope this gentle, pizza-dispensing contraption achieves its own level of success anyway.

[via Boing Boing]

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