Sunday, 12 January 2025

Why Make Things Simple?

when with a bit of ingenuity you can make things complicated,


I guess that was the thought behind these fantastical scenarios by William Heath Robinson, he was a English cartoonist, illustrator and artist, best known for his drawings of whimsical inventions to achieve simple objectives, inspired some of the greatest minds of his time – so much so that they named something else after him apart from his cartoons, during WWII, one of the codebreaking machines built to assist in the decryption of German message traffic (the predecessor to the world’s first programmable digital electric computer), was named “Heath Robinson” in his honour, at first glance the drawings are fascinating, but on a second or third look I can see so much more, 






and then along came the war, 

Heath-Robinson began his career as an illustrator with his first published works as a children’s illustrator in 1897, it was only in 2016 that the Heath Robinson Museum opened to house a collection of nearly 1,000 of his original artworks in North West London, close to where the artist lived, 

over at The National Museum of Computing, you can get a look at the machine that was named after him, and this is it above, what an amazing imagination he must have had.


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