| W. Heath Robinson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 31 May 1872 |
| Died | 13 September 1944 |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Cartoonist |
| Known for | Drawings of odd contraptions |
William Heath Robinson (signed as W. Heath Robinson, 31 May 1872 – 13 September 1944) was an English cartoonist and illustrator, best known for drawings of eccentric machines.
In the UK, the term "Heath Robinson" has entered the language as a description of any unnecessarily complex and implausible contraption, similar to "Rube Goldberg" in the U.S. It is perhaps more often used in relation to temporary fixes using ingenuity and whatever is to hand, often string and tape, or unlikely cannibalisations. Its popularity is undoubtedly linked to Second World War Britain's shortages and the need to "make do and mend".
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William Heath Robinson was born at 25 Ennis Road on 31st May 1872 into a family of artists in an area of London known as Stroud Green, in Islington. His father and brothers (Thomas Heath Robinson and Charles Robinson) all worked as illustrators. His early career involved illustrating books - among others: Hans Christian Andersen's Danish Fairy Tales and Legends (1897); The Arabian Nights, (1899); Tales From Shakespeare (1902), and Twelfth Night (1908), Andersen's Fairy Tales (1913), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1914), Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1915), and Walter de la Mare's Peacock Pie (1916).
In the course of his work Heath Robinson also wrote and illustrated two children's books, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902) and Bill the Minder (1912), which are regarded as the start of his career in the depiction of unlikely machines. During the First World War he drew large numbers of cartoons, collected as Some "Frightful" War Pictures (1915), Hunlikely! (1916), and Flypapers (1919), depicting ever-more-unlikely secret weapons being used by the combatants.
He also produced a steady stream of humorous drawings, for magazines and advertisements. In 1934 he published a collection of his favourites as Absurdities, such as:
Most of his cartoons have since been reprinted many times in multiple collections.
The machines he drew were frequently powered by steam boilers or kettles, heated by candles or a spirit lamp and usually kept running by balding, bespectacled men in overalls. There would be complex pulley arrangements, threaded by lengths of knotted string. Robinson's cartoons were so popular that in Britain the term "Heath Robinson" is used to refer to an improbable, rickety machine barely kept going by incessant tinkering. (The corresponding term in the U.S. is Rube Goldberg, after an American cartoonist with an equal devotion to odd machinery. Similar "inventions" have been drawn by cartoonists in many countries, with the Danish Storm Petersen being on par with Robinson and Goldberg.)
One of his most famous series of illustrations was that which accompanied the Professor Branestawm books by Norman Hunter. The stories told of the eponymous professor who was brilliant, eccentric and forgetful and provided a perfect backdrop for Robinson's drawings.
One of the automatic analysis machines built for Bletchley Park during the Second World War to assist in the decryption of German message traffic was named "Heath Robinson" in his honour. It was a direct predecessor to the Colossus, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer.
In 1903 he married Josephine Latey, the daughter of newspaper editor John Latey.[1] Heath Robinson moved to Pinner, Middlesex, in 1908. His house in Moss Lane is commemorated by a blue plaque. A project is now (2007) in hand to restore West House, in Memorial Park, Pinner, to house a Heath Robinson Collection.
The name "Heath Robinson" became part of common parlance in the UK for complex inventions that achieved absurdly simple results from about the time of the First World War.[2] Though less common today, the epithet "Heath Robinson" was used in the BBC's Planet Earth documentary series, in which devices used to create smooth camera movements, such as the effective steadicam made out of bicycle wheels and rope used to sail up a 100 metre high mound of bat droppings, were said by David Attenborough to be "Heath Robinson affairs". It has also been used by Jeremy Clarkson in his programme Speed (Episode 5 — Superhuman Speed) when describing the piping in a space-rocket's engine. It was also used in a 2009 BBC Horizon programme (Why Can't We Predict Earthquakes) to describe a fault slip measuring device. And more recently it was in an episode of the BBC's long-running astronomy programme The Sky at Night to refer to a box-like device used for observing colour fractions of the Sun's light.
In Pink Floyd's 1971 concert film Live at Pompeii, Nick Mason described the band's early on-stage musical experiments as "Heath Robinson".
During the Falklands War (1982), British Harrier aircraft lacked their conventional "chaff" dispensing mechanism.[3] Therefore Royal Navy engineers designed an impromptu delivery system of welding rods, split pins and string which allowed six packets of chaff to be stored in the airbrake well and deployed in flight. Due to its complexity it was often referred to as the "Heath Robinson chaff modification".[4]
The episode "Japan's Last Secret Weapon" of the BBC series "Secrets of World War II" describes the balloons launched from Japan against the US West Coast as "a veritable Heath Robinson weapon of war".
David Langford's farce novel The Leaky Establishment is set at a nuclear research facility on "Robinson Heath".
In the third volume of Market Risk Analysis, Carol Alexander uses the term "Heath Robinson approach" to describe the ad hoc approaches to modelling volatility by option pricing practitioners.