Heath Robinson Contraptions

Product Information

A "Heath Robinson contraption" is perhaps most commonly used in relation to temporary fixes using ingenuity and whatever is to hand, often string and tape, or unlikely cannibalisations. William Heath Robinson is an artist whose work, whether in his well known humorous drawings or his illustrations for Kipling, Shakespeare or children’s stories, is integral to British cultural heritage. Although his name is still regularly used in common parlance, the man behind the contraptions is not widely understood. His masterpiece was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1914) in which he set out to provide ‘a record of … the most wonderful moonlight night in fantasy’.

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. His brother Tom was already living in Pinner and they enjoyed meeting in the Queen’s Head in the High Street with their artist friends.

Elon Musk may be one of the most famous people in the world, but his name isn’t an adjective and if it were, it probably wouldn’t be for anything good. To celebrate his work and influence, the William Heath Robinson Trust is raising funds to develop a London museum dedicated to the illustrator. The Heath Robinson Museum opened in October 2016 to house a collection of nearly 1,000 original artworks owned by The William Heath Robinson Trust. After leaving the Royal Academy Schools in 1897, Robinson wanted to become a landscape artist, but the need to earn a solid income led to him pursue a career in illustration, a career his father and two older brothers were already engaged in. With illustrations salvaged from the family archives and commentary by Heath Robinson expert, Geoffrey Beare, Contraptions is the best possible introduction to the work of one of Britain’s great comic talents.

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. At the time of Heath Robinson's death in 1944, only a minority of the public remembered his work as a serious illustrator. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. As a child, my parents had an early book of his collective work and use to spend hours, absorbed by the intricacy of the illustrations — I used to love drawing my own Heath Robinson-esque creations and so bought this book to hopefully share that with my own children.I know a lot of his contraptions are superfluous and complicated, but they embody the English madness and invention. The combination of his facility with the medium and his unique vision means that, although these pictures are completely different from his commercial work, they are immediately recognisable as his. The eponymous hero is tasked with looking after his nephew Peter, who is one day whisked away by a large bird. His gadgetry -- despite how daft it was and because of how daft it was -- really embodied the crazy, but innovative culture of Great Britain.

The museum houses a permanent exhibition of original artwork, books, photographs, film and other media. His father Thomas, an illustrator and engraver, had to illustrate the main news story each week for the Penny Illustrated Paper. A photograph at the end of the permanent displays shows Robinson at his desk with these more refined illustrations for magazine and book covers on the walls. 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. WIRED investigates the campaign to raise funds for a permanent museum dedicated to the British artist, satirist and illustrator.Doubling Gloucester cheese by the Gruyère method in an old Gloucester cheeseworks when cheese is scarce’ (1940), W. Robinson served as a consultant at the Percy Bradshaw's The Press Art School, a school teaching painting, drawing, and illustration by correspondence. The British are still a nation of garage-haunting amateur engineers who will recognise the inhabitants of Heath Robinson’s world, with their pot bellies and pots of tea, archaic faces and sturdily commonsensical approach to the problems of existence. 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 went on to illustrate Shakespeare, Kipling, and more of his own books, in colour and black and white.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.As the champion of pragmatic man, Heath Robinson presented a vision of the British as an unflappable, ingenious and slightly demented breed of inventors that persists to the present day. 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. 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.