India – The humorist and children's author Sukumar Ray, in his nonsense poem " Abol tabol", had a character (Uncle) with a Rube Goldberg-like machine called "Uncle's contraption"( khuror kol). This word is used colloquially in Bengali to mean a complicated and useless object. Before the first world war, it was not only grand households that employed servants – they were common in middle-class homes too. Even poorer families might pay a girl to assist around the home. The war helped put an end to this. Working-class women, many of whom had taken on what had traditionally been seen as “men’s jobs” during the war, realised that domestic service was no longer their default job opportunity. “You just can’t get the help!” became the much-parodied cry of the middle-class matron. To Heath Robinson, the disappearance of servants, which was encouraging the development of labour-saving domestic technology, like vacuum cleaners, was an ideal hook for his outlandish imaginary contraptions. In a series of drawings for the Sketch, a magazine, called “Heath Robinson Does Away with Servants” (1921), he proposed impractical devices made from cogs, pulleys, cords and wires that could perform simple household tasks. What makes his pictures funny is the people in them. Heath Robinson always gave his characters a kind of dumpy amiability, as they stoically tried to adapt to the brave new world around them.

lottery funding helped pay for the new museum pavilion in Pinner Memorial Park. Photograph: Luke HayesIt is the idea of the wonderful machine that makes Heath Robinson relevant today. "When you look at the cement works pictures, essentially the process isn't any different now. The pictures are silly because people are powering the machines. But they were silly then. Where he did go over the top, however, was with aeroplanes and that is because when he was working, they were essentially new. There are wonderful pictures of flying trains with people sitting on the wings eating ice cream, which don't really make sense. It was just his imagination going wild and therefore not in the same league as his contraptions such as the Ransomes lawn mowers." These are central to the success of Heath Robinson as a comic artist because, despite the machinery simultaneously powering children's toys and drying washing on a line attached to the clippings collector, they "fulfil a need. You perceive a need and you design a machine."

An event called 'Mission Possible' [9] in the Science Olympiad involves students building a Rube Goldberg-like device to perform a certain series of tasks.

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The Connisseur Bookself". The Connoisseur: An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors. 51 (204): 223. 1 August 1918 . Retrieved 12 August 2020– via The Internet Archive. William Heath Robinson was born in Hornsey Rise, London, on 31 May 1872 [5] into a family of artists in Stroud Green, Finsbury Park, North London. His grandfather Thomas, his father Thomas Robinson (1838–1902) and brothers Thomas Heath Robinson (1869–1954) and Charles Robinson (1870–1937) all worked as illustrators. His uncle Charles was an illustrator for The Illustrated London News. [6] Career [ edit ]

William Heath Robinson was born on 31 May 1872 into a family of artists. From 1887, he studied at Islington Art School for three years, before moving to the Royal Academy. He wanted to become a landscape painter but, realising this would not support him, he initially concentrated on book illustration. By 1899, he had illustrated an edition of Cervantes' 'Don Quixote', and another of 'The Arabian Nights'. In 1900, he illustrated an edition of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 1902 he wrote his first book, 'The Adventures of Uncle Lubin', for the first time enjoying complete artistic license. He also worked on an edition of the writings of Rabelais, and published another book, 'Bill the Minder', which was an enormous success. These characters are also very earnest," says Adam Hart-Davis, author of 'Very Heath Robinson', a sumptuously illustrated and often hilarious coffee table tome celebrating the life and work of the great illustrator. "None of them ever laugh because what they are doing in factories is very serious." The design of such a "machine" is often presented on paper and would be impossible to implement in actuality. More recently, such machines have been fully constructed for entertainment (for example, a breakfast scene in Peewee's Big Adventure) and in Rube Goldberg competitions. Day, Langston (1976). The Life and Art of W. Heath Robinson. Wakefield: EP Pub. p.17. ISBN 0715811800 . Retrieved 27 January 2022. Heath Robinson delighted in depicting people who appeared to be unaware of the peril they were in. The growing phenomenon of domestic life in the sky afforded him many such opportunities. In these illustrations for the book “How to Live in a Flat”, the balconies of modernist flats provide the setting for some unlikely, and dangerous, activities: children playing traditional games and adults taking part in synchronised exercises. Heath Robinson’s appreciation of fashionable architectural forms – Art Deco, with its elegant, sweeping curves, and the clean, geometric angles of the International Style – influenced his own approach, making his drawings bolder, sharper and less cosy.

Hart-Davis remembers growing up with a house full of some 20,000 books, most of which were serious (his father Sir Rupert Hart-Davis was a book publisher), with the odd exception. Such exceptions included the works of Heath Robinson, which Hart-Davis junior found funny as well as absurd. Yet the big question was always "would these contraptions work? You look at these complicated machines and if you look at them very carefully, generally, despite the absurdity, they are feasible. Certainly no engineer would ever attempt to solve these problems in the same way. But it is very joyful to see a silly way of logically solving them, which is why I think engineers to this day are so fond of these pictures." There's a one-piece chromium tube kitchen table and chair set that is as mesmerising as any of Escher's optical illusions. "That's right. You have to follow the tubing around to see if it works. Would it be possible to do that?" This illustration is part of the same series. After a dinner party, a middle-aged couple use hand pumps to operate a pulley system that installs a mezzanine bedroom for their guest above the drawing room. Like “The Folding Garden”, it plays into middle-class anxieties about keeping up appearances while dealing with a shortage of space. Anyone who’s gone flat-hunting recently in one of our more overcrowded and expensive cities will feel a jolt of recognition.

As well as producing a steady stream of humorous drawings for magazines and advertisements, in 1934 he published a collection of his favourites as Absurdities, such as: 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.Ironically, the event that may have done more than anything else to establish Robinson as a comic genius proved to be the Great War. There was precious little about life and death in the trenches to laugh about, but somehow Robinson culled humour even from such an unlikely source. “The much-advertised frightfulness and efficiency of the German army, and its many terrifying inventions, gave me one of the best opportunities I ever enjoyed,” he remembered. And his success at lampooning the enemy proved a great boost to the morale of the front-line troops. His final act amounted to the last commentary on the marvels of modern living, which he so often satirized. In September 1944 he underwent exploratory surgery in anticipation of a more extensive operation on his prostate. He returned home with tubes and catheters attached to his body and feeling in all likelihood like one of the unwieldy machines he had so often created. Apparently thinking it an undignified fate, he pulled out the tubes and quietly died. On the TV show Food Network Challenge, competitors in 2011 were once required to create a Rube Goldberg machine out of sugar. [8] Norway – The Norwegian artist and author Kjell Aukrust (1920–2002) was famous for his drawings of over-intricate and humorous constructions, which he often attributed to his fictive character, inventor-cum-bicycle repairman Reodor Felgen. Eventually Reodor Felgen became one of the protagonists of the successful animated movie Flåklypa Grand Prix (English: The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix), in which Felgen's inventions were in fact props constructed in accordance with Aukrust's drawings by Bjarne Sandemose of the animation studio run by film director Ivo Caprino.