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?" 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. As the champion of pragmatic man, Heath Robinson presented a vision of the British as an unflappable, ingenious and slightly demented breed of inventors that persists to the present day. The British are still a nation of garage-haunting amateur engineers who will recognise the inhabitants of Heath Robinson’s world, with their pot bellies and pots of tea, archaic faces and sturdily commonsensical approach to the problems of existence. Rare early rough sketches, providing an insight into the illustrator’s way of working and generating ideas Robinson may have grown a bit wistful about his own popularity, which had diverted him from his dream of becoming a serious artist and left him “type-cast” as simply a jokester. This seemingly inescapable fate might have inspired his 1920 sketch for The Bystander, titled “A Heath Robinson drawing of Heath Robinson drawing a Heath Robinson drawing.”

Brazil – A TV series from 1990 to 1994 had an intro based on a Rube Goldberg Machine. The show, Rá-Tim-Bum, was created by Flavio de Souza, and was about science for children.

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The collection was put up for sale following the death of its previous owner Simon Heneage in 2011 and without these grants, it was at risk of being offered more widely and potentially broken up. 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. Deceiving the invader as to the state of the tide, part of a series looking at possible ways to resist a German invasion

The Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais published by Grant Richards, London, 1904. Reprinted by The Navarre Society, London, 1921 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. 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: By the 1940s, Heath Robinson’s focus had shifted to the realities of war. His later books had titles such as “How To Make The Best Of Things” (1940), “How To Build A New World” (1941) and in 1943, a year before his death, “How To Run A Communal Home”, from which this image is taken. The cheese-on-toast machine is reminiscent of the pancake-making and potato-peeling devices he drew for Norman Hunter’s early “Professor Branestawm” books. It may be silly, but the monochrome lines, the institutional setting and the candle-powered machine’s built-from-scrap appearance are a serious nod to wartime Britain’s make-do spirit. Like much of Heath Robinson’s work, it manages to be at once tongue-in-cheek and optimistic.

Heath Robinson was one of Britain’s most successful graphic artists. His work has had a huge influence on comic art in this country, but also on the image and self-image of the British. The Incredible Machine is a series of video games in which players create a series of Rube Goldberg devices. The board game Mouse Trap has been referred to as an early practical example of such a contraption. 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. By the 1920s, he was known as the Gadget King. The codebreakers of Bletchley Park even named one of their whirring contraptions after him. He worked on advertisements, too, producing drawings for over 100 companies, selling everything from steel girders and Swiss rolls to toffee, beef essence and asbestos cement, depicting each product being manufactured in a fantastical imaginary process. His parents enrolled him in the Islington School of Art, and, fueled by his soaring ambition, he succeeded in gaining admission to the Royal Academy in 1892. But by his own admission his work did not compare favourably to that of some of his classmates. By 1897, when it became necessary for Robinson to begin earning an income, he realistically decided that “so few people wanted their portraits painted,” and “nearly all the churches were already decorated.” After a short and unsuccessful attempt at establishing himself as a landscape painter, Will reconsidered commercial art, a line of work his brothers had already embraced.