British illustrator William Heath Robinson is part of the British vernacular, defined in a British : American online dictionary simply as “Rube Goldberg.” Born in 1872, he aspired to become a landscape painter, but realized that a career in book illustrations would be more lucrative. Although he had success with book publishers, it was his magazine illustrations that brought him widespread fame. His depictions of fancifully practical inventions forever associated his name, in the British language anyway, with overly complicated and clever contraptions. Often his work imagined the absurdity of the human capacity for problem solving. Always his work was grounded in real world physics. According to his BBC biography, he died in 1944 after disconnecting himself from a contraption that was keeping him alive.