The Gothic-Kinetic Merlin of Wild Goose Cottage

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.

Petunia Power. For example, the Forget-Me-Not computer, which will next appear at the Ontario Science Center in Toronto, was financed, with extraordinary largesse, by Honeywell, the for-real computer manufacturer--and is a hilarious sendup of the whole electronic-brain industry. It comes in three parts --"like Henry IV, or whoever it was," according to its creator--all of them visibly risible. It is shaped like an elephant, in accordance, says Emett, with Livingstone's Law: "Memory may hold the door, but elephants never forget." Among its components are an eeny-meeny-miney-mo unit (random selection) and a card-punch system run by electrified woodpeckers.

The Vintage Car, sponsored by Borg-Warner, is equipped with cut-glass liqueur-decanter fog lamps, a crystal ball to predict traffic conditions ahead, a petunia-powered antipollution catalyst and a speedometer that registers from Nought, through Gently, to AWFUL. In fact, Emett notes, the machine "has a great safety factor: it doesn't move." His Far Tottering Railway was a hot ticket at the 1951 Festival of Britain at which it transported more than 2 million passengers; it is now the puffing pride of Toronto, installed at the Ontario Science Center. The Gentleman's Flying Machine is powered by a Wandering Hot Air Brazier and "a swarm of underslung butterflies providing a trivial lift to the nose section."

Rowland Emett has had more than trivial genetic lift. His grandfather was Queen Victoria's court engraver, his father an amateur inventor. Emett himself has put wires together and lines on paper since early childhood. At 13 he devised a novel gramophone windup mechanism--just as gramophones succumbed to electricity. Undeterred, he became a stellar and sometimes lunar cartoonist. During World War II, some equally dotty boffin at the Air Ministry decided from Emett's complicated cartoons that the artist--a man as mild as Lewis Carroll's Dormouse--should be commandeered to help build nongentle-manly aircraft for the R.A.F.

Emett, now 70, says he does not want to make any more Things. Even a Hush-a-Bye Hot Air Rocking Chair, with all its crumpeted and cushioned comforts, can take months to complete, demand the services of 15 artisans and put his 200-year-old blacksmith's forge on 24-hour duty. The antic Edison of Wild Goose Cottage plans to paint and draw lithographs, wallpaper, cartoons and other whatsits that may yet make Emettiana an American household word. Mary, his loving wife and canny business brains of 35 years, concurs. Emett will nonetheless retain his wry, sly urge to celebrate and spoof humanity. At the trade fair in Philadelphia last week, an onlooker buttonholed the creator of the Forget-Me-Not computer and demanded: "But what's the end product?" Emett's considered answer: "To bring the smallest smile to the eye of the beholder."

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