The History of Murphy's Law

And, yes, The Beat Goes On (and on, and on, and on...)

By Jerry Cates

The titular creator of Murphy's Law was Capt. Edward A. Murphy, a worker at North Base, on the edge of the California Mojave desert.

The place was a hotbed of aviation research in the 1940's. In 1947 Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier there in the Bell X-1. As a top-secret reservation, names like North Base and South Base were fine for those "in the know." It was re-named Edwards AFB in 1950 to honor Capt. Glen Edwards, a test pilot killed when his YB-47 flying wing crashed in 1948.

In 1951, Edwards AFB became the primary USAF Flight Test Center. But before that it was used for experiments to determine how much abuse the human body could endure.

The effects of deceleration and acceleration forces, oxygen deprivation, and super-oxygenation, were tested using live human subjects. One of these projects was code-named MX981. It studied sudden deceleration's effects on pilots during simulated airplane crashes.

In 1949, Capt. Murphy was an engineer on MX981. The manager, a Northrop engineer named George Nichols, began collecting a list of "laws" that he half-jokingly used to explain negative outcomes.

Once Murphy found, after an otherwise successful test, that a technician had wired a transducer wrong on the project sled and, as a result, the precious data from the transducer was lost. The device involved measured deceleration forces, so that each use of the sled, which held a human (in this case,. John P. Stapp, M.D.) who was subjected to those forces, could be properly documented. On the test in question, Dr. Stapp nearly had his eyeballs torn out, for nothing. Murphy laconically told Nichols that "If there is any way to do it wrong, he (the technician) will find it." Nichols added this quip to the list, naming it "Murphy's Law." Others read it, and Murphy's Law caught on.

Later Dr. Stapp rode the MX981 sled to a stop on another test with the transducers installed correctly, pulling 40 Gs without serious injuries. At a subsequent press conference, he explained why the project had an excellent safety record. Project personnel, he said, believed in Murphy's Law, and in the necessity for working around it.

The story was published, and other military and civilian workers began to apply Murpny's Law to their operations. The rest, as they say, is history. 

But History Repeats Itself...

Murphy's Law, for all its palliative utility, is no panacea for the foibles of mankind.  A graphic example of the continuing robustness of this Law was provided by the disastrous crash of NASA's Genesis capsule. That crash, in September 2004, produced---as a NASA spokesman put it---"unquantified science degradation." The cause of this disaster? You probably guessed it: the deceleration sensors in the capsule were installed backwards, i.e., NASA made the same thing mistake with the Genesis capsule that created Murphy's Law in the first place. Worse, the engineers on the Genesis project had benefit of several then-recent disasters (costing billions of dollars) involving similar mistakes, yet apparently failed to learn from them.

I warn you, though, not to think less of NASA for these mistakes, or poke too much fun at their engineers with unbridled glee. Lest you forget, Murphy's Law is universal and unstoppable. If you are engaged in any kind of serious developmental research or engineering endeavor, you are in its clutches. Only the foolish think otherwise...

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