William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) was an illustrator whose work often included complicated contraptions to do simple tasks, rather like those depicted more recently in Wallace and Gromit films.
Heath Robinson's illustrations were intended to be humerous, but when designing systems for people, it can be easy to continually add features in an ad hoc fashion and end up with an archane product rather like them.
Used in Chap. 8: page 118
Links:
Wikipedia: W. Heath Robinson- heathrobinsonmuseum.org: The Heath Robinson Museum
By William Heath Robinson - From the Book: William Heath Robinson Inventions, Public Domain, hosted by Wikimedia Commons