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Born into a family of artists in London, England, his early career was as a book illustrator, for example in Hans Christian Andersen's Tales; The Arabian Nights, (1899); Tales From Shakespeare (1902), and Twelfth Night (1908), 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
Most of his cartoons have since been reprinted many times in multiple collections.
The machines he drew were usually kept running by balding, bespectacled men in overalls. The machines were frequently powered by steam boilers or kettles, heated by candles or a spirit lamp; often there would be complex pulley arrangements, threaded by lengths of knotted string. Robinson's cartoons were so popular, that even to this day in Britain, the name "Heath Robinson" is applied as a shorthand for an improbable, rickety machine barely kept going by incessant tinkering. (The corresponding term in the US is Rube Goldberg, after an American cartoonist with an equal devotion to odd machinery.)
One of the automatic analysis machines built for Bletchley Park during World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough to assist in the decryption of German message traffic, including the Enigma machineIn the history of cryptography, the Enigma was a portable cipher machine used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. More precisely, Enigma was a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines — there were a variety of different models. The Enigma w, was named "Heath Robinson" in his honour. It was a direct predecessor to the ColossusThe Colossus was the first programmable (to a limited extent) digital electronic computer, used for breaking German Fish Cyphers, especially the Lorenz cipher. It was designed by Max Newman and associates of Bletchley Park, and was built by the British Po, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer.