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.
Read more about this topic: W. Heath Robinson
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.”
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“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)