A museum dedicated to British artist, satirist and illustrator William Heath Robinson is due to open this weekend.
The William Heath Robinson Trust has been raising funds for years in an attempt to preserve his legacy in a new north-west London museum, and thanks to £1.3million in Lottery funding that has now become possible, reports the BBC. In March 2015, the Trust secured the paintings and drawings after being awarded grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and the Art Fund, ensuring the works would stay together in the UK - and now in their new home in Pinner, London.
The museum houses a permanent exhibition of original artwork, books, photographs, film and other media. It will also run special exhibits, the first of which is called "Heath Robinson at War" and contains 60 original artworks, books, Christmas cards made for the different sections of the military, and letters from the troops to Robinson thanking him for the work. The museum writes: "In each World War, Heath Robinson demonstrated his ability to counter, by the application of gentle satire and absurdity, both the pompous German propaganda and the fear and depression engendered by the horrors of war." It goes on to quote the man himself, thus: "I believe that our sense of humour played a greater part than we were always aware of in saving us from despair during those days of trial."
Robinson's work is steeped in that humour. His name was included in the dictionary from 1912 as a synonym for absurd, ingenious and over-complicated makeshift devices, like the ones he spent his life designing.
Back in 2013, when the William Heath Robinson Trust was working hard to secure Robinson's immense legacy, WIRED took a closer look at the man who inspired countless contributions to popular culture and design, from Wallace & Gromit to Thomas Heatherwick. The original feature is below.
Heath Robinson: the unsung hero of British eccentricity and innovation
Heath Robinson's name has been used to describe absurdly complex, makeshift contraptions since the early 20th century. Despite this, the man behind the name is largely unknown. WIRED investigates the campaign to raise funds for a permanent museum dedicated to the British artist, satirist and illustrator.
*"Your absurd, beautiful drawings... give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world."
H.G. Wells in a letter to Heath Robinson in 1914*
Colossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer, had a simpler predecessor: an electromechanical machine created in 1943 used by
British codebreakers at Bletchley Park to crack the German Lorenz cipher machine. The machine consisted of three parts: a frame onto which two teleprinter paper tapes were mounted -- weaving their way through a convoluted network of reels -- and read optically; a rack containing counters and another rack for valved logic circuits.
It was a tricky system: the teleprinter tape had to be prepared meticulously, requiring two very long loops of the paper -- one with 2,000 characters of cipher text and the other punched with patterns generated by the Lorenz machine's message-encrypting wheels -- to be fed into the machine, woven around a sequence of spools. The second tape had to be precisely one character longer than the first so that it would automatically change the punched patterns by one position after completing a single circuit of the tapes. Keeping these tapes synchronised when they were moving at over 1,000 characters a second was a major challenge, and they would often tear or stretch.
The machine was called Heath Robinson, after the British cartoonist and illustrator best known for designing fantastically complicated machines. Despite its shortcomings, it was an effective prototype, and paved the way to the development of the Colossus computer, which swapped tape for an electronic system.
William Heath Robinson was well-known at the time as "The Gadget King" thanks to his cartoons of madcap inventions which were published in magazines at the time.
He died in 1944, well before GCHQ declassified the work that took place at Bletchley Park, so Robinson wouldn't have been aware of his computational namesake. Nor the many artists, designers, architects and engineers that he has since inspired.
These days to describe something as Heath Robinson-esque is to describe an invention or machine that is simultaneously ingenious, overly-complicated and makeshift. A Heath Robinson contraption is the British counterpart to a Rube Goldberg machine, and the term has been included in the dictionary officially since 1912.
Although his name is still regularly used in common parlance, the man behind the contraptions is not widely understood. To celebrate his work and influence, the William Heath Robinson Trust is raising funds to develop a London museum dedicated to the illustrator. It will shed light not only on his cartoon contraptions, but, according to Geoffrey Beare, his "unique and timeless sense of humour", his "wonderful draughtsmanship" and his "bold and innovative watercolours", which lie at the cusp of impressionism and modernism.
Trustee Beare is author of several books about William Heath Robinson and Chairman of the wonderfully named Imaginative Book Illustration Society. He told WIRED: "The Heath Robinson Museum Project will fill a significant gap in the arts provision in this country. There is a real public hunger to see Heath Robinson's work and learn more about his life. Our project will make accessible for the first time a unique collection of his works, supporting documents and published material to inform, educate and entertain a broad range of people. Apart from the Trust's collection there is very little of his work in public collections and what there is rarely shown."
Robinson was born in London in 1872 into a long line of artists. He aspired to be a landscape painter, but had little commercial success and so followed his father and brothers into commercial book and magazine illustration. He provided the artwork for a number of books, including Don Quixote,
The Water Babies and The Pilgrim's Progress before writing his first of three children's book in 1902, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin. The eponymous hero is tasked with looking after his nephew Peter, who is one day whisked away by a large bird. Lubin then embarks on a series of machine-assisted adventures, building an airship and a submersible seaboat in his quest to track down his loved one: so started his journey to towards becoming The Gadget Man.
He married Josephine Latey, the daughter of a newspaper editor, in 1903. As a man he was humble and gentle -- "the essence of a good chap", in Beare's words. He was very close to his own children and liked to surround himself by fellow artists and professionals. He had a cat which he named Saturday Morning, presumably after his favourite time of the week.
In the run up to and during World War One, Robinson became known for a series of drawings in magazines such as
The Sketch and The Tatler, poking fun at modern living, carrying normal tasks to ridiculous extremes often using complex or convoluted contraptions -- described as "simple devices" -- to perform trivial tasks, such as potato peeling, wart removal and pancake making. Very quickly his work became popular, allowing him to command healthy commissions.
More topical were his illustrations, which recognised the ridiculousness of war. "He took a stand against war by taking the piss out of Germany's horrendous war machinery," says author Robert Endeacott, a life-long Robinson fan who has developed a screenplay with Tony White based on Robinson's life.
One such cartoon showed "a new method of training young German ski troops to do the goose step on the frozen steppes of Russia", another depicts "the Huns using siphons of laughing gas to overcome our troops before an attack in close formation" (1915), while "Flying Kettle Attack" features German troops with tiny umbrellas impaled on their Pickelhaubes (spiked helmets) sending kite-flown kettles pouring hot water over to the allied trenches, and the
["Subzeppmarinellin"](http://i.ebayimg.com/t/W-HEATH-ROBINSON-VINTAGE-HUMOROUS-PRINT-1938-The-Subzeppmarinellin-/00/s/MTAyNFg3ODE=/z/wI4AAMXQWlFRrLHG/$(KGrHqJ,!ooFC72n+wIRBRrLHGhKBg~~60_12.JPG) is a fearsome battle vehicle -- half submarine, half zeppelin -- for a double-pronged German attack. "A lot of anti-war protests stemmed from Heath Robinson. He's an unrecognised hero. He led people into questioning the war effort but at the same time his creations -- depicting 'Weapons of Moronic Distinction' -- were useful in helping morale," says Endeacott.
Beare agrees: "He made an important contribution to the war effort just by raising morale. He was one of the first cartoonists to depict the German's as ridiculous rather than as ogres tearing babies apart."
In addition to mocking the enemy, he also caricatured the war effort on the home front, drawing a fairer system to administer rations of butter based on the weight of the customer and a magnetic system for stretching spaghetti to make it go further.
In many of his pieces, he satirises man's obsession with machine, drawing elaborate winch-and-pulley systems, powered by belching steam boilers with pedals, magnets, pipes and levers precariously assembled into enormous structures, all depicted with ironic grandeur and performing mundane tasks. Portly human operators and bystanders are oblivious to the absurdity of their creations, seemingly preferring to rely on gadgetry than perform simple manual tasks. "Everybody [in the illustrations] is going about their business very seriously," explains Beare.
It's possible to see his influence in a wide range of subsequent creative works -- from Monty Python, The Goons and Wallace & Gromit. Aardman Animations' Nick Park has said that all of Wallace's inventions are designed around the principle of "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut", a principle that encapsulates Heath Robinson's work perfectly.
In fact, the parallels between Aardman's "cracking contraptions" and Heath Robinson's are, on occasions, startling. The Wallace-Gromit household borrows heavily from a full-scale model of a contraption-filled house entitled "The Gadget Family", designed and built for the Ideal Home Show in 1934 -- there are even trapdoors delivering the family to the breakfast table.
Artist Rob Higgs, who creates sophisticated mechanical artworks, one of which is an enormous corkscrew made from 300 pieces of scrap metal which sold for £100,000, told WIRED that Robinson's satire still stands today. "I believe his observations have become far more relevant today as we become more and more reliant on improbably complex and convoluted gadgets, (and earning the money to buy them). Until we recognise that most of these so called labour saving devices are actually restricting our freedom rather than liberating us, and more importantly, that our individuality and cultures are homogenised as a result, then his message will still be relevant."
Architect and Bartlett Professor of Architecture and Urbanism CJ Lim, told WIRED that Robinson's work and commentary doesn't feel dated. "He is still very current in his mode of inventiveness, particularly in the age of computers."
Lim is interested in how Robinson required a person to be part of the mechanism to work, focusing on human behaviour as much as the rise of the machine. He adds that there is a unique Britishness to his inventions: "Today's machines are very universal. Samsung makes essentially the same gadgets as Apple and Sony. His gadgetry -- despite how daft it was and because of how daft it was -- really embodied the crazy, but innovative culture of Great Britain. That's something that modern technology, however efficient it is, doesn't have. His machines are very culturally prescriptive, but the ones we have now are global and interchangeable."
To pay homage to The Gadget Man, Lim has developed an architectural concept called the Sky Transport Project, which replaces London Underground's Circle Line with long, narrow boats tasked with traversing "the urban sky-river" to alleviate some of the ground congestion and offer a low-carbon alternative for commuters.
"Heath Robinson's drawings look at our daily problems and invent some sort of device to overcome that difficulty -- be it mowing the lawn or making a cup of tea. I found the Circle Line infuriating. So I purposefully looked into creating a design where the contraption is much more backwards and you require people to row this boat."
His work has also provided food for thought for members of the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, a group of automata creators including Paul Spooner and Keith Newstead.
Spooner told WIRED: "His pictures are mechanical stories and his brilliance lies not only in the draughtsmanship but in his humour and his attitudes -- a lesson for automata makers who are prone to getting over-excited by machinery for its own sake."
Newstead even developed a machine called the Rabbit Eradicator in direct homage to the man.
"He was probably one of the most inventive satirical artists from the last century," adds Lim. "I know a lot of his contraptions are superfluous and complicated, but they embody the English madness and invention."
Beare goes even further, suggesting that Robinson forecast chaos theory through a series of drawings called "Consequences", published in Hutchinson's Magazine in 1924. These showed chains of events happening in cause-and-effect sequences that seemed very unlikely. One example is titled "How a Sermon may be cut short by the mere falling of an Autumn Leaf".
While James York and Edward Lorenz (no relation to the German Lorenz machine) might have something to say about Beare's generosity towards Robinson's legacy, it's clear that these illustrations evoke the spirit of chaos theory in an incredibly accessible way.
Despite being immortalised in the dictionary, and having had so much influence on artists, writers (including the aforementioned HG Wells), designers and architects, and despite all of the hard work of the William Heath Robinson Trust, Robinson has missed the [presumably kettle-powered] boat in terms of national recognition. "Heath Robinson as a term is still commonly used in English language and culture but he has no permanent museum. He produced more work than Lowry! Arguably he's had more of an effect on British society," says an impassioned Endeacott.
Robinson's US counterpart, Rube Goldberg, on the other hand has been treated with more reverence: he has been featured on postage stamps, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and annual competitions to build Rube Goldberg machines are held in his honour.
In his introduction to The Art of Rube Goldberg by Rube's granddaughter Jennifer George, Adam Gopnik argues that Goldberg is the more credible of the two. He writes that the similarities between Goldberg and Robinson are "obvious", however he believes that Robinson's work is full of "fantasy and whimsy and cosiness", while Goldberg "is thoroughly a cartoonist, in the American, point-scoring style, with the harder tabloid American edge of drawing".
Gopnik adds: "Robinson's machines are eccentric; Goldberg's are practical -- you can build them, as in the game of Mouse Trap -- and so, because they are practical and buildable, they are, in another way, sinister. They appear too close to actual machines to be dismissed as mere whimsy."
Beare contests Gopnik's analysis: "What he is saying is that Goldberg is not a cissy artist but a macho cartoonist in the tabloid tradition. Goldberg trained as a mining engineer and worked for the San Francisco Department of Water and Sewage before finding employment as a sports cartoonist in 1905 and as a cartoonist was entirely self-taught."
Heath Robinson, on the other hand, trained at Islington School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools. "He was a fine artist, illustrator and cartoonist who had the ability to adapt his style to his subject. In his early humorous work he was a surrealist and he always said that for his pictures to work, the reader had to believe that the artist took his subject entirely seriously. That his drawings are beautifully rendered and his contraptions set against fine landscapes or townscapes is an essential part of the joke."
He adds: "I do not think that Mr Gopnik would disagree with me that Goldberg was an engineer who drew cartoons and Heath Robinson was an artist who drew some contraptions."
At the time of Heath Robinson's death in 1944, only a minority of the public remembered his work as a serious illustrator. "But like Hogarth and Rowlandson before him, the appeal of his humorous art was largely the result of his considerable talents as a serious artist," explains the Trust's website.
Beare hopes that in funding a permanent museum (currently there is a small collection that can be viewed on Wednesdays and Saturdays), it will help people understand that the meaning we ascribe to the term "Heath Robinson" is "relevant but not sufficient". He was also an accomplished fantasy book illustrator and watercolourist. Indeed, the man himself seemed to have "got a bit fed up with" the continual use of his name in association with bizarre rickety contraptions and the associated rumours that he was locked up in an asylum and allowed out once a week to deliver his invention. Evidence for this is a studio portrait, shot in 1929. Evidently a carefully composed shot, it features a range of his work in the background -- illustration, watercolours, magazine covers. Conspicuous by their absence, were his contraptions.
WIRED suggested to Beare that perhaps Robinson fell victim to the same po-faced solemnity he so mocked in the subjects of his illustrations -- taking his fine artworks too seriously and not stepping back to appreciate what everybody else could see. Beare says this is unfair and that he "saw it as his profession and appreciated it". By the 30s he could command as much as 50 guineas per drawing -- an enormous sum at the time (roughly £3,000 in today's money). It allowed him to send his children to public school, go on holidays and hire a car with a driver. By the 40s he even had a BBC radio programme trying -- somewhat absurdly -- to advise children on how to draw. None of this would have been possible without his contraptions. "He was much more than that. But if it's kept his name alive and that leads people back to his other work, that's great," concludes Beare.
If you want to support the Heath Robinson Museum, you can sign up to the mailing list found on HeathRobinson.org. A crowdfunding campaign will launch in October, with a view to opening the museum in 2015.
Updated 08/10/2013: The Kickstarter campaign has now launched. You can donate here.
Updated 20/12/2013: The Project to build a Heath Robinson Museum was awarded a £1,133,100 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Sue Bowers, Head of Heritage Lottery Fund London, said that "the project will introduce him, and the breadth of his talent, to new audiences while conserving a large collection of his work". The museum still needs to raise a further £200,000 in order to build the museum. You can make a donation here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
