Though there have been many phrases similar to what we know now today as Murphy's Law, the most common connection between the phrase and a person has always remained the same and most widely accepted as you will read below. Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Famed writer, Arthur Bloch, in the first volume (1977) of his Murphy's Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG series, prints a letter that he received from George E. Nichols, a quality assurance manager with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. Nichols recalled an event that occurred in 1949 at Edwards Air Force Base, Muroc, California that, according to him, is the origination of Murphy's law, and first publicly recounted by USAF Col. John Paul Stapp. An excerpt from the letter reads: The law's namesake was Capt. Ed Murphy, a development engineer from Wright Field Aircraft Lab. Frustration with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error in wiring the strain gage 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 at the Lab. I assigned Murphy's law to the statement and the associated variations. A similar bit was found in the following article, which was excerpted from The Desert Wings (March 3, 1978); Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will") was born at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 at North Base. It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash. One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it." The contractor's project manager kept a list of "laws" and added this one, which he called Murphy's Law. Actually, what he did was take an old law that had been around for years in a more basic form and give it a name. Shortly afterwards, the Air Force doctor (Dr. John Paul Stapp) gave a press conference. He said that their good safety record on the project was due to a firm belief in Murphy's Law and in the necessity to try and circumvent it. Aerospace manufacturers picked it up and used it widely in their ads during the next few months, and soon it was being quoted in many news and magazine articles. Murphy's Law as we know it today, was born. More on Capt. Murphy below: ★ Birth Name: Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr. ★ Nickname(s): Ed ★ Born: January 11, 1918; Panama Canal Zone ★ Died: July 17, 1990 (aged 72) ★ Allegiance: United States of America ★ Service/Branch: United States Army, United States Air Force ★ Years Of Service: 1940 – 1947 (USA), 1947 – 1952 (USAF) ★ Rank: Major ★ Battles/Wars: Pacific Theatre of World War II, Korean War ★ Other Work: Research in aerospace engineering and reliability engineering Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr. (January 11, 1918 – July 17, 1990) was an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems. Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1918, Murphy was the eldest of five children. After attending high school in New Jersey, he went to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1940. The same year he accepted a commission into the United States Army, and undertook pilot training with the United States Army Air Corps in 1941. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theater in India, China and Burma (now known as Myanmar), achieving the rank of major. Following the end of hostilities, in 1947 Murphy attended the United States Air Force Institute of Technology, becoming R&D Officer at the Wright Air Development Center of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It was while here that he became involved in the high-speed rocket sled experiments (USAF project MX981, 1949) which led to the coining of Murphy's law. Murphy himself was reportedly unhappy with the commonplace interpretation of his law, which is seen as capturing the essential "cussedness" of inanimate objects. Murphy regarded the law as crystallizing a key principle of defensive design, in which one should always assume worst-case scenarios. Murphy was said by his son to have regarded the many jocular versions of the law as "ridiculous, trivial and erroneous." His attempts to have the law taken more seriously were unsuccessful. In 1952, having resigned from the United States Air Force, Murphy carried out a series of rocket acceleration tests at Holloman Air Force Base, then returned to California to pursue a career in aircraft cockpit design for a series of private contractors. He worked on crew escape systems for some of the most famous experimental aircraft of the 20th century, including the F-4 Phantom II, the XB-70 Valkyrie, the SR-71 Blackbird, the B-1 Lancer, and the X-15 rocket plane. During the 1960s, he worked on safety and life support systems for Project Apollo, and ended his career with work on pilot safety and computerized operation systems on the Apache helicopter.
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