William Heath Robinson was born in 1872. He studied art and achieved modest success in the early 1900s as an illustrator, but he found his real metier as a cartoonist for Punch and other English journals of that ilk. With a quasi-serious silliness, he poked fun at the complexities of modern life, taking a subject matter intrinsically dull and humourless and transforming it into a concept that was quite fantastical and whimsical.
A typical Heath Robinson cartoon would give a panoramic view of a convoluted, yet ingenious, machine. The complex device, usually dilapidated from perpetual use and kept intact by strings and ill-fitting nuts and bolts, would be designed to perform a very simple task, but was none the less supervised by several very serious attendants. The humour lay in the cleverness and complexity of the design, and in the implied effort required of the unquestioning invigilators to ensure that it continued to fulfil its very trivial raison d'etre.
Images like this made Heath Robinson a household name. He died 56 years ago, on September 13th, 1944, but even today any device which is undependable or patently homemade, or perhaps unnecessarily complex for its mundane purpose, is called a "Heath Robinson contraption".
The nearest thing in meteorology to a Heath Robinson device is undoubtedly an anemometer - not, as you might think, the Robinson cup anemometer, whose whirling hemispheres are named after another Robinson, the Rev Thomas Romney of that name, but the rather more complex Dines pressure-tube device. It is a masterpiece of mechanical complexity, which on first impressions ought not to work at all, but which in fact performs its task with an unsurpassed effectiveness.
Named after its late 19th century inventor, William Henry Dines, the pressure-tube anemometer senses the direction of the wind with a wind vane, mounted on a mast, whose movement is mechanically coupled to a pen in the recording hut below. The pivoting arm of the anemometer, however, is also a hollow tube, which keeps the vane orientated towards the wind; a gusting and lulling breeze, playing on this orifice, causes variations in the air pressure inside the tube, and these are conveyed by means of a long pipe to the recording part of the instrument - a drum half-full of water in the hut beneath.
The descended pipe ends in the enclosed cavity formed by a hollow float and the water in which it is free to bob up and down. The movement of the float, caused ultimately by the wind, is harnessed to a pen whose trace corresponds to increases and decreases in the wind speed. Heath Robinson it may be - but, perhaps surprisingly, it works.