Who was that Murphy guy after whom the famous Murphys Law was named?
Born in 1917, Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the United States Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject’s body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount. Of course, somebody managed to install all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later. Within months, ‘Murphy’s Law’ had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering, and finally reached the Webster’s dictionary in 1958. Tragically (and perhaps typically), the popular cliche we call ‘Murphy’s Law’ was never uttered by Edward Murphy. The original pronouncement was: If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then some
