31st May: Heath Robinson

William Heath Robinson was born on this date in 1872. He is an artist famous for drawings of ingenious, complicated and makeshift contraptions.

1. The term "Heath Robinson", meaning an absurdly complicated, and often cobbled together, machine with a simple function, was officially included in the dictionary in the early 20th century.
2. Heath Robinson really wanted to be a landscape painter, but, making no money at that, went into book illustration like his father and brothers. The books he illustrated included Don Quixote, The Water Babies, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Arabian Nights, Tales from Shakespeare and Andersen's Fairy Tales.
3. He wrote three children's books: The Adventures of Uncle Lubin, Bill the Minder and Peter Quip in Search of a Friend. It is in the first of these books, which were also illustrated by him, that his fantastic machines started to appear.
4. He has an American counterpart in Rube Goldberg, a US artist who also drew complicated machines for achieving simple tasks.
5. Heath Robinson had a cat called Saturday Morning.
6. He achieved fame through his drawings for The Sketch and The Tatler with cartoons poking fun at modern living and the use of machines to perform simple tasks. These included machines for removing warts, making pancakes, throwing water at serenading cats (the multimovement tabby silencer) and stretching spaghetti to make it go further.
7. With the outbreak of World War I, he became even more popular, because "he took a stand against war by taking the piss out of Germany's horrendous war machinery" (Robert Endeacott). Popular cartoons of that time included a method of training German ski troops to do the goose step on the frozen steppes of Russia, and German troops sending flying kettles to pour hot water into the allied trenches. At the same time as making subtle anti-war statements, he raised morale in the UK by making people laugh.
8. An early code-breaking machine at Bletchley Park in 1943 was called "Heath Robinson". It had a convoluted network of tapes and spools, logic circuits and counter racks. It was a challenge to load and use, but was a direct precursor to Colossus, the world's first programmable computer.
9. Geoffrey Beare, a biographer of Heath Robinson, has suggested that the artist had an understanding of chaos theory long before it was published by scientists. Beare's evidence for this was a series of drawings called "Consequences" which depict chains of unlikely cause and effect sequences, for example, "How a Sermon may be cut short by the mere falling of an Autumn Leaf".
10. David Langford's farce novel The Leaky Establishment is set at a nuclear research facility on "Robinson Heath".