"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 23/11/17 (Heath Robinson)

Thanks to John Shepherd who sent an e-mail saying, "Was there ever a real Heath Robinson?" And Heath Robinson is a slightly old-fashioned saying now, and it describes anything that is impractical, eccentric, sometimes ingeniously so, or sometimes it looks as if it's about to fall apart. But we might call some contraption or other, "That's a bit..." We might say, "That's a bit Heath Robinson". It all goes back to an illustrator and cartoonist who was called William Heath Robinson, who was alive from 1872 to 1944. And he delighted in sketching extremely unlikely looking machine which is capable of doing incredibly quirky, irregular jobs, so they were absolutely wonderful. But he meant, really, to be quite satirical, so he was poking fun at the supposedly labour saving inventions that were really all the rage at the beginning of the 20th century. And so he specialised in drawing these ludicrously overcomplicated devices that would... you know, were designed, really, to produce some kind of simple conclusion, but, as I say, went all the way round the houses to do it. So I thought I'd give you some examples because they were lovely. There was a multi-movement tabby silencer, ehich automatically threw water at sereneding cats, a bedside bomb extinguisher, a resuscitator for stale scones. He didn't however, design anything that could solve friendish maths calculations, and that's, of course, that cos he hadn't met Rachel. But had he met Rachel, it would have been a cartoon of her. But Heath Robinson, if you have a chance to look at his cartoons, they're really special.