The $533 million, 58,000-member Zeal Credit Union's sponsored team of science enthusiasts broke the world record for the most dominoes toppled at an event and are awaiting word from the Guinness Book of World Records as to whether they've completed the highest number of steps in a Rube Goldberg machine.
The Livonia, Mich.-based cooperative sponsored Michigan State University senior Steve Price and a team of 16 builders in their attempt to deploy half a million objects, including 200,000 dominoes, within a single machine, which they dubbed the Zeal Credit Union Incredible Science Machine.
The Michigan Science Center in Detroit provided the space for the event and the team members came to Detroit from around the U.S., Canada and Europe to take part in the July 18 event, the credit union said.
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"It was a huge undertaking that helped bring the world to Detroit," Lisa Fawcett, vice president of marketing for Zeal Credit Union, said. "Everyone stepped up to help including the Michigan Science Center, which provided the wonderful venue; our credit union employees who picked up and dropped off builders and families to the airport and delivered lunches; Detroit Public Television who live-streamed this record-setting event and several media outlets that provided excellent coverage."
"It was a shining moment for all the builders who worked so hard," Annemarie Dolan, the mother of the 11-year-old Brady Dolan, the youngest builder on the team. "We felt like we built a community of our own with the support of Zeal Credit Union staff, representatives of the Discovery Channel, the Science Center, and others who helped." Her son will attend sixth grade in the fall at Forsythe Middle School in Ann Arbor, Mich.
The late Rube Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for newspapers in both San Francisco and New York, drew roughly 50,000 cartoons during his career, many depicting zany machines that relied on chain reactions to accomplish some goal, according to Rube Goldberg, Inc., an educational not-for-profit organization formed to further science education through Goldberg's work.
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