“You give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world.”
Heath Robinson New Baby Card
How to obtain a good night’s sleep in spite of interruptions
$3.95
After a wedding, you know what to expect next. In a scene from How to be a Perfect Husband (1937), Heath Robinson demonstrates the ultimate solution to sleepless nights.
When baby’s cries grow hard to bear, the perfect husband is ready. Demonstrating the ingenuity of true love, he turns a bedside handle and hey presto, the problem is gone. A day or two in the garden shed has produced an apparatus so elegant and efficient it both reduces noise and brings a healthy dose of fresh air to the new-born infant. Who could object to that?
William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) is one of the few artists whose names have become part of the English language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression is used to describe ‘any absurdly ingenious and impractical device’. Heath Robinson started out as a landscape artist and book illustrator before finding world-wide fame with his mechanical fantasies. He invented machines for making coffee, lighting cigars, extinguishing candles, peeling potatoes, testing raincoats, saving chickens from injury when crossing the road and conducting just about every other conceivable, and sometimes inconceivable, activity. He satirized the new ways of living that came with technological change, small flats and shortages, creating a whimsical social commentary on his times: history encapsulated in pictures.