MADE WORLD LAUGH

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 8, Issue 39, 12 January 1945, Page 2

MADE WORLD LAUGH

There are. lew artists who have made more people laugh than Mr William Heath whose death occurred recently. His mechanical ingenuity and weird machines made even scientists and engineers smile. So famous, were his drawings that it became a common expression to describe any complicated or involved machine as a "Heath Robinson contraption." The weird machines which he invented on paper were something more than comic for many 9 1 his amazingly ingenious devices did actually work. j At the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition in 19JJ4, a house fitted with: the gadgets which Mr Heath Robinson had designed was< construct--ed. They all actually worked; —to amazement and amusement of scores

of thousands., He said of himself that people thought he was a "kind of ingenious mad hatter wandering round absent-mindedly with poc'kets full of knotted string nails and pegs of wood ready to invent anything at a moment's- notice." But this was far from the Heath Robinson was a man who took even his comic work seriously. Although famous as. a comic artHeath Robinson was a serious student in his younger days. He entered an art school at 15 and earned his living drawing antiques for some years..