W. Heath Robinson - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The name "Heath Robinson" became part of common parlance in the UK for complex inventions that achieved absurdly simple results from about the time of the First World War. Though less common today, the epithet "Heath Robinson" was used in the BBC's Planet Earth documentary series, which used devices used to create smooth camera movements, such as the effective steadicam made out of bicycle wheels and rope used to sail up a 100 metre high mound of bat droppings - described by David Attenborough as "Heath Robinson affairs". It has also been used by Jeremy Clarkson in his programme Speed (Episode 5 — Superhuman Speed) when describing the piping in a space-rocket's engine. It was also used in a 2009 BBC Horizon programme ( "Why Can't We Predict Earthquakes") to describe a fault-slip measuring device. And more recently an episode of the BBC's long-running astronomy programme The Sky at Night used it to brand a box-like device used for observing colour fractions of the Sun's light.

In Pink Floyd's 1971 concert film Live at Pompeii, Nick Mason described the band's early on-stage musical experiments as "Heath Robinson".

During the Falklands War (1982), British Harrier aircraft lacked their conventional "chaff"-dispensing mechanism. Therefore Royal Navy engineers designed an impromptu delivery system of welding rods, split pins and string which allowed six packets of chaff to be stored in the airbrake well and deployed in flight. Due to its complexity it was often referred to as the "Heath Robinson chaff modification".

The episode "Japan's Last Secret Weapon" of the BBC series "Secrets of World War II" describes the balloons launched from Japan against the US West Coast as "a veritable Heath Robinson weapon of war".

David Langford's farce novel The Leaky Establishment is set at a nuclear research facility on "Robinson Heath".

In the third volume of Market Risk Analysis, Carol Alexander uses the term "Heath Robinson approach" to describe the ad hoc approaches to modelling volatility by option-pricing practitioners.