who must rescue his nephew Peter from the wicked Bagbird.
His whimsical adventures take him from the moon
William Heath Robinson (May 31, 1872–September 13, 1944) was an English cartoonist and illustrator, who signed himself W. Heath Robinson.
Born into a family of artists in Islington, London, his early career was as a book illustrator, for example in Hans Christian Andersen's Danish Fairy Tales and Legends (1897); The Arabian Nights, (1899); Tales From Shakespeare (1902), and Twelfth Night (1908), Andersen's Fairy Tales (1913), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1914), Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1915), and Walter de la Mare's Peacock Pie (1916).
In the course of this however, he wrote and illustrated two children's books, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902), and Bill the Minder (1912); these are regarded as the start of his career in the depiction of unlikely machines. During World War I he drew large numbers of cartoons, collected as Some "Frightful" War Pictures (1915), Hunlikely! (1916), and Flypapers (1919), depicting ever-more-unlikely secret weapons being used by the combatants.
Besides these, he produced a steady stream of humorous drawings, for magazines and advertisements. In 1934, he published a collection of his favourites as Absurdities, such as
- "The Wart Chair. A simple apparatus for removing a wart from the top of the head"
- "Resuscitating stale railway scones for redistribution at the station buffets"
- "The multimovement Tabby Silencer", which automatically threw water at serenading cats
Most of his cartoons have since been reprinted many times in multiple collections.
