Art: W. Heath Robinson

Britain mourned last week one of its best-loved comic artists. He was William Heath Robinson, England’s Rube Goldberg, whose drawings of outrageously improbable contraptions have tickled his countrymen for 30 years. Bespectacled, mustached, 72 -year-old Robinson died of heart disease at his London home.

Robinson’s first published cartoon was a drawing of a professor gravely examining birds’ footprints in the sand, while a fascinated bird followed the strange human track. He produced a mad catalogue of patched-together devices constructed on such engineering principles as this: “The strength of a piece of string, as of a chain, lies in its weakest part, and surely it is wisdom to cut this out and tie in a stronger piece.” In 1934 London’s Ideal Homes Exhibition included one solemn Robinson exhibit which proved a sensation: a carefully constructed, full-size Robinson house fitted with Robinson gadgets. One of them: a baby-washer made of revolving stands, one for the baby, the other carrying soap, sponge and nailbrush; the baby was washed simply by revolving the stands in opposite directions. Another convenience was a bedroom directly over a dining room so rigged that the owner could descend through the floor into a dining chair while, simultaneously, the cover over the bacon & eggs ascended to the ceiling.