Heath Robinson Contraptions

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He went on to illustrate Shakespeare, Kipling, and more of his own books, in colour and black and white. It was a book bursting with images and a nice size to hold (bigger than an average hard back but with a lighter weight feel.

To celebrate his work and influence, the William Heath Robinson Trust is raising funds to develop a London museum dedicated to the illustrator.

These days to describe something as Heath Robinson-esque is to describe an invention or machine that is simultaneously ingenious, overly-complicated and makeshift.

Even though Robinson’s magazine career took him through both World Wars, harmlessness seems to be the theme that runs through his work.It was in Pinner that the finest of his book illustrations were made, as well as much of the work that established him as a humorist. By 1900, when he illustrated Poe’s Poems, he was acclaimed as a ‘worthy disciple of the modern school of penmen. Much of Heath Robinson’s humorous work centres on the human condition, and the weakness and self-importance of man rather than the gadgets and contraptions themselves. 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. The phrase 'Heath Robinson', used to describe eccentric machinery, had entered the language by the First World War (the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is of 1917).

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.He may have not have made a fortune or led a life of adventure, but from the suburbs he managed to make the fantastical creations that people have enjoyed for more than a hundred years. Robinson took up their suggestion to have a British soldier playing a game, the aim of which was to grab the spiked ‘pickelhaube’ helmets from the heads of Germans in the opposing trenches. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. In 2016 the Heath Robinson Museum opened in Pinner, the suburb of north-west London where the artist lived during his most productive decade.