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For the Second World War codebreaking device, see Heath Robinson (codebreaking machine)

William Heath Robinson 1872 - 1944

Collection of W. Heath Robinson's "Railway Ribaldry", originally published at the request of the Great Western Railway who were celebrating their centenary in 1935.

William Heath Robinson (May 31, 1872 – September 13, 1944) was an English cartoonist and illustrator, who signed himself W. Heath Robinson. He is best known for drawings of eccentric machines and "Heath Robinson" has entered the language as a description of any unnecessarily complex and implausible contraption.

Born into a family of artists in Islington, London, his early career was as a book illustrator, for example in 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 this however, he also wrote and illustrated two children's books, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902), and Bill the Minder (1912); these 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.

Besides these, he produced a steady stream of humorous drawings, for magazines and advertisements. In 1934, he published a collection of his favourites as Absurdities, such as:

• "The Wart Chair. A simple apparatus for removing a wart from the top of the head"
• "Resuscitating stale railway scones for redistribution at the station buffets"
• "The multimovement tabby silencer", which automatically threw water at serenading cats

Most of his cartoons have since been reprinted many times in multiple collections.

The machines he drew were usually kept running by balding, bespectacled men in overalls. The machines were frequently powered by steam boilers or kettles, heated by candles or a spirit lamp; often there would be complex pulley arrangements, threaded by lengths of knotted string. Robinson's cartoons were so popular, that even to this day in Britain, the name "Heath Robinson" is used as shorthand for an improbable, rickety machine barely kept going by incessant tinkering. (The corresponding term in the US is Rube Goldberg machine, after an American cartoonist with an equal devotion to odd machinery.)

One of his most famous series of illustrations were those that 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.

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. More information is available at The West House & Heath Robinson Museum Trust

A World War I cartoon by W. Heath Robinson

His name 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^[1]. Though less common today, Heath Robinson was referred to in the BBC's Planet Earth documentary series, where 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 engine's piping of a space-rocket.

• W.Heath Robinson, Railway Ribaldry ,originally published 1935, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd , England, ISBN 0-7156-0823-1

• Heath Robinson, William , My Line of Life , 1938, Blackie & Sons
• W.Heath Robinson, Heath Robinson at War ,1942, London, Methuen
• Lewis, John , Heath Robinson Artist and Comic Genius, 1973, Barnes and Noble
• De Freitas, Leo John, The Fantastic Paintings of Charles and William Heath Robinson , 1976, Peacock/Bantam
• Beare,Geoffrey , W. Heath Robinson , 1987, Chris Beetles
• Hamilton, James, William Heath Robinson , 1992, Pavilion
• Beare, Geoffrey , The Brothers Robinson , 1992, Chris Beetles
• Beare, Geoffrey, The Art of William Heath Robinson, 2003, Dulwich Picture Gallery

• Norman Hunter (author)
• Professor Branestawm
• Rube Goldberg

1. ^ http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hea4.htm

• Historic Figures at the BBC web site. Accessed May 2007

• The William Heath Robinson Trust
• Heath Robinson online exhibition
• SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages: Fairy Tale Illustrations of William Heath Robinson
• Children's Book Illustrators Gallery - Large Archive of W.H Robinson illustrations
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