LOGICALLY ABSURD MECHANICS
Roll up, roll up for the launch of the Apple iPhone 8 coming to a store near you! How much does it cost, is it thinner than a sheet of A4, and does it have an inbuilt box of tricks that make the iPhone 7 look like a dark ages relic? Maybe at the push of a button it will make kitchen appliances cook three course meals, or even conjure up a virtual nanny to collect the kids from school. That would make the iPhone 8 a labour saving gadget, putting it in the same mechanical league as mango splitters, garlic peelers, and salad leaf rotators.
I’m all in favour of gaining time by saving labour, although I couldn’t tell you how many extra minutes have been added to my life from owning a mango splitter. At a guess, I would say zero because for me the joy of eating a mango comes from biting into its flesh rather than splitting it apart with a mechanical device. Similarly, my method for peeling garlic is as effective as the gadget that supposedly takes the stress out of de-skinning the pods. The product in question is a rubber tube into which a garlic clove is slipped before being rolled across a flat surface until the skin comes off. It does work, although by my reckoning it’s just as quick to remove the skin with a knife. As for the salad leaf rotator, don’t get me started! The one I palmed off onto my sister bit the dust after an over vigorous spin!
Although my relationship with those gadgets can hardly be described as positive that hasn’t been true of every labour saving item I’ve encountered. Many were and still are a Godsend, especially for busy stay at home mums. My earliest childhood memories are of my mother bent over a bath tub hand washing the laundry. It was back aching work, but her life changed in 1972 when she bought a top loading washing machine with a separate spin dryer. The soap powder boxes and fabric conditioner bottles that had shared the cupboard space with toothbrushes, denture pills, and shaving foam cans were finally relegated to the kitchen. Doing the laundry was still a chore but it stopped feeling like hard labour as it could be done in a couple of hours rather than days. The washing machine was my mother’s liberator!
Her experience and that of millions of other women triggered a flurry of academic papers analysing the impact of labour saving devices on society, yet the artist and illustrator William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) approached the subject with a sideways, prescient humour that in many respects was ahead of its time. Gravity defying contraptions that extracted teeth, dropped peas into open mouths without having to use cutlery, or which allowed gardeners to weed flowerbeds without dirtying their boots, pushed the idea of the labour-saving gadget to a logically absurd conclusion. So what if the drawings are decades old? Their observations are still relevant, which is why generations of satirists have picked up from where Heath Robinson left off. The adult comic Viz published a joke advert for Inconticart, a mobility scooter for people with bowel problems, fitted with a toilet bowl, soil pipes, and a chain handle flush. What would Robinson have made of it, especially the image of a bespectacled, pipe smoking man on a toilet seat with his trousers concertinaed around his ankles? The joke’s vulgarity would have probably appalled him, even though Inconticart is a superb example of the Oxford English dictionary definition of a Heath Robinson: “Any absurdly ingenious and impracticable device”.
His output was prodigious, which is why choosing the best of his work is like trying to find a diamond on a beach, although TV presenter Adam Hart-Davis has risen magnificently to the challenge. His excellent biography Very Heath Robinson, the culmination of four years research, places Robinson’s art in the context of the life and times in which he lived. The Britain of his canvas was a proud industrialised nation of box house suburbs, an aspiring middle class, and a burgeoning market for cutting edge labour saving products. Servants may have managed the homes of the aristocracy, but for families who couldn’t run to that expense the vacuum cleaner and gas fired water heater were nothing short of a blessing. Mechanisation was making life easier for the masses and Robinson was the bystander interpreting the changes with his own mischievous twist. Imagine an armchair fitted to a lawnmower with a built-in drinks cabinet, radio, library, and a table piled high with food? Could that same lawnmower be re-calibrated to play records, or allow a busy mother to carry out her domestic chores while cutting the lawn? In Robinson’s world anything is possible!
In 1934 the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition asked him to design an automated house. The front of this fully functioning model, inhabited by a family of three quarter sized dummies called Glowmutton, was removed to let visitors see what was going on inside – and what a view! Mr and Mrs Glowmutton would be woken by an alarm clock that also made them a cup of tea, at which point a bucket shower would release a jet of hot water into their bath. While all this was going on a breakfast gong operated two pulleys that transported the couple through the bedroom floor to the dining room table. In the kitchen, the cook would be furiously peddling a bicycle to operate an egg beater, while baby Glowmutton was washed and scrubbed in a tub with a revolving sponge wheel. Robinson trialed these ideas in some of his earlier drawings and more than sixty years later the British animator Nick Park reworked those clanking mechanics into the Wallace and Gromit films.
So, what would William Heath Robinson make of a twenty first century world where everything and anything, from cappuccinos to sex, can be bought or sold online via a mobile phone? Hart-Davis leaves the reader to work that out for themselves, although I half suspect that Robinson might have a few concerns about an environment so dependent on technology that even the most basic chores are done with the push of a button. Why should it take an app to open or close the curtains, or adjust the temperature of a fridge? Are self-driving cars really a good idea? What would be the point of driving lessons? Let’s be clear, I am not a Luddite nostalgically yearning for the days when houses were lit with candles while food was cooked over open fires. Technology has both extended and improved the quality of our lives and I’m proud to be among the beneficiaries, but it can and often does have a distorting effect. Is it healthy or normal to share our intimacies online, or acquire thousands of Facebook “friends”, the majority of whom we’ll never even meet? What’s the point of these relationships if they’re transitory, or lacking the trust and happiness that defines a genuine friendship? Perhaps labour saving devices have put too much time into our hands, which might explain why so many lives are lived through mobile phone handsets. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be re-engaging with my mango splitter, or buying an iPhone 8. Well, not yet!
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
This article first appeared in Dante Magazine: http://www.dantemag.com/
