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The Origin of Murphy's Law
LauraW writes "HotAIR, the web site of the Annals of Improbable Research , is publishing a fascinating series on the Origin of Murphy's Law. It turns out there really was a Murphy, and the story of his law involves rocket sleds, Chuck Yeager, and Edwards Air Force Base. The article covers all these topics and more, and includes interviews with Yeager, the son of Murphy (really), and several surviving members of the project that inspired the law."
Mirror here.
I have become the world's leading expert on Murphy's Law. No really, I'm serious. You doubtless have heard the Law: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. To some it is a profound statement of philosophy, a reminder that life can be defined just as much by its inherent challenges as anything else. To others however the Law is a pessimistic comment that underscores, albeit in more elegant terms, that shit happens.
Whatever you might think about Murphy's Law, one thing is certain: it is as ubiquitous an expression as there is in American English. Over the years it has been cited in thousands of articles, websites and news reports, been the subject of several books, appeared as the title of at least one bad Charles Bronson movie and a TV show, and inspired about a dozen zillion corollary Laws. Just about every time something goes wrong somewhere, the Law gets its two cents in. Fortunately my expertise owes very little to actual adversity -- I'm not writing this from a hospital bed -- and almost everything to research. Historical research. Which is to say I have become the expert on the origins of Murphy's Law. This happened by accident...and if I'd known what the consequences would be of sticking my nose into it -- how I'd draw the wrath of Chuck Yeager, get caught in the middle of a nasty 20-year feud, and nearly wind up in a hospital bed -- I probably wouldn't have bothered.
The Road to Murphy's Law
This all began a few months ago, after I showed an article I'd written for an aviation history magazine to my neighbor. The article concerned some goings on at Edwards, the famed Air Force flight test facility, in the 1950's. "You know," my neighbor said, "You'd probably be real interested in talking to my father, David Hill Sr. He worked at Edwards, on a bunch of rocket sled tests in the 1940's. In fact," he continued proudly, "he knew Murphy."
"Murphy?" I inquired, searching my memory for a test pilot of the same name. Yeager, Crossfield, Armstrong... It didn't ring a bell.
"You know, Murphy," he went on. "The guy who invented Murphy's Law."
I didn't say it, but I was absolutely skeptical. Who wouldn't be? One might as well claim to be friends with Kilroy, know the identity of Deepthroat, or the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart. The notion seemed outright laughable. Your father knew Murphy? Sure he did! If Murphy wasn't some imaginary Irish folk hero, then he was probably a gentle sage who drank a lot of Guinness and lived back in the 1700's. Needless to say I let the subject slide.
But a day or two later, I almost tripped over a slender book called Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong that had been left on my doorstep. The book cited Murphy's Law and then listed literally hundreds of amusing corollaries. The extremely brief forward to the volume included a letter written by an engineer named George Nichols. And this is where things got interesting. Nichols said he'd worked on a series of rocket sled tests at Edwards in the 1940's with a Colonel John Paul Stapp and that Murphy's Law emerged from these tests.
"The Law's namesake," Nichols wrote, "was Capt. Ed Murphy Jr., a development engineer... Frustrated with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error in wiring the strain gauge bridges caused him to remark -- 'if there is any way to do it wrong, he will' -- referring to the technician who had wired the bridges. I assigned Murphy's Law to the statement and the associated variations..."
That appeared straightforward enough, and piqued my interest. I subsequently did some research and I discovered to my surprise that the story of the origin of Murphy's Law was not something generally agreed upon. Accounts in fact varied wildly. Some sources gave the credit solely to Ed Murphy Jr., a man they praised for his wisdom, insight, and panache, but said almost nothing about. In other places, Nichols' letter appeared -- often word for word -- explaining how he had come up with "the statement." And at least a few writers suggested that Co