He was very close to his own children and liked to surround himself by fellow artists and professionals. In 2016 the Heath Robinson Museum opened in Pinner, the suburb of north-west London where the artist lived during his most productive decade.

Our project will make accessible for the first time a unique collection of his works, supporting documents and published material to inform, educate and entertain a broad range of people. In fact, the parallels between Aardman's 'cracking contraptions' and Heath Robinson's are, on occasions, startling. The Wallace-Gromit household borrows heavily from a full-scale model of a contraption-filled house entitled 'The Gadget Family', designed and built for the Ideal Home Show in 1934 – there are even trapdoors delivering the family to the breakfast table. Even when he tackled the horrors of the day, his depiction of German soldiers gassing British troops in the trenches from 1915, for example, is a million miles from John Singer Sergeant’s Gassed (1919). Portly human operators and bystanders are oblivious to the absurdity of their creations, seemingly preferring to rely on gadgetry than perform simple manual tasks.Spooner told WIRED: "His pictures are mechanical stories and his brilliance lies not only in the draughtsmanship but in his humour and his attitudes -- a lesson for automata makers who are prone to getting over-excited by machinery for its own sake.

It was in Pinner that the finest of his book illustrations were made, as well as much of the work that established him as a humorist.He received a constant stream of letters from both troops at the front and the public at home thanking him for bringing a little joy into their miserable lives and suggesting subjects for his pen. It was a tricky system: the teleprinter tape had to be prepared meticulously, requiring two very long loops of the paper -- one with 2,000 characters of cipher text and the other punched with patterns generated by the Lorenz machine's message-encrypting wheels -- to be fed into the machine, woven around a sequence of spools. The Wallace-Gromit household borrows heavily from a full-scale model of a contraption-filled house entitled "The Gadget Family", designed and built for the Ideal Home Show in 1934 -- there are even trapdoors delivering the family to the breakfast table. These days to describe something as Heath Robinson-esque is to describe an invention or machine that is simultaneously ingenious, overly-complicated and makeshift.

Heath Robinson, on the other hand, trained at Islington School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Keeping these tapes synchronised when they were moving at over 1,000 characters a second was a major challenge, and they would often tear or stretch.

Despite its shortcomings, it was an effective prototype, and paved the way to the development of the Colossus computer, which swapped tape for an electronic system. William Heath Robinson was born in Hornsey Rise, London, on 31 May 1872 [5] into a family of artists in Stroud Green, Finsbury Park, North London.It goes on to quote the man himself, thus: "I believe that our sense of humour played a greater part than we were always aware of in saving us from despair during those days of trial. With illustrations salvaged from the family archives and commentary by Heath Robinson expert, Geoffrey Beare, Contraptions is the best possible introduction to the work of one of Britain’s great comic talents. The museum’s permanent collection tells the story of Robinson’s life and career, describing a hard-working illustrator who lived a reasonably modest and happy life mostly on the outskirts of London. Besides admiring the detail and the perfect clean line drawing of this great artist, one of the reason why Heath Robinson's contraptions are so amusing is that he shows them as if they were practical and economical and naive solutions to everyday problems.