If asked to name his profession, Rowland Emett would probably answer "Fantasticator." No other term could remotely convey the diverse genius of the perky, pink-cheeked Englishman whose pixilations, in cartoon, watercolor and clanking 3-D reality, range from the celebrated Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway to the demented thingamabobs that made the 1968 movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang a minuscule classic. It is no wonder that he has been dubbed by admiring Americans the British Rube Goldberg. But that, with all due deference to the late Rube (who was a great admirer of Emett), is to compare Edward Lear with Ogden Nash, or Mozart with Meyerbeer. Sosays TIME Senior Writer Michael Demarest, who has followed Emett's career for three decades, and wrote this affectionate portrait of the man and his work:
Last week, as bait for a British trade fair, Emett's incomparable Forget-Me-Not computer (it does everything but compute) drew wide-eyed throngs to Wanamaker's in Philadelphia. His Exploratory Moon-Probe Lunacycle MAUD, (Manually Assisted Universal ,Deviator), complete with Astrocat ("Since cats always land on their feet, she is carried to establish which way up gravity is"), is reverently ensconced in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. The Emett Vintage Car of the Future, dedicated to the Spirit of Future Retrogression, is installed at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and a new suburban Cleveland shopping mall proudly displays his Featherstone-Kite Openwork Basket-Weave Mark Two Gentleman's Flying Machine with its unique autopilot FRED (Freehand Remembering Empirical Doodling system). Starting this month, the makers of Wall-Tex wall coverings will bring Emett's wry whatsits and dotty doodads into the American home with prepasted wallpapers celebrating the inventions he prefers to call Things. Long as they may cling to the wall, they may make many comfortable notions come unstuck.
Thingmaker Emett is that most insidious of subversives, a spoofer who makes existential sense. A nostalgic-romantic artist-humorist social commentator-engineer whose furbelows and feathery drawings are familiar to longtime readers of Punch and LIFE, he is a man with one hand at the controls of Nellie, "senior engine" of Far Tottering O.C.R.R., and the other outstretched for hot buttered crumpets on the moon.
Though a satirist, Emett is a gentle one, with a high regard for human fallibilities and amenities, as well as for cats, birds, butterflies and flowers. What makes the Sussex Merlin all the more remarkable is that he can use a welding torch and glue. With tin, antique doorknobs, hip baths, umbrellas, bicycle parts, lamp shades, stained glass, saucepan lids, Victrola horns, ear trumpets, soup strainers, miles of wicker and wiring, he transforms cartoon fantasies into whispering, whistling, wheezing, whirring, gothic-kinetic machines that work, but mostly play. And mock.