Murphy’s Law
If anything can go wrong, it will.
Undoubtedly the most frequently cited of all laws, and a remarkably fecund one too, having inspired a host of related rules, Murphy’s Law is of surprisingly recent vintage. The earliest reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary, the usual benchmark for dating the origins of words and phrases, comes only from 1958. And despite its apparent newness, the authorship of the law was a mystery for some years. The most common assumption at first was that Murphy was a mythical character similar to the author of the parallel Finagle’s Law. A cartoon character, the anti-hero of a series of Navy training films was suggested as the source of the law by John Glenn, the astronaut who became a senator in Into Orbit (1962). The theory had some logic to it since the Murphy of the films was a careless mechanic apt to turn bolts the wrong way and install propellors backwards. Still another candidate for the honour was an actual person, William Lawrence Murphy (1876-1959), inventor of the Murphy bed that folds out of a closet. But there was no real evidence for this attribution aside from occasional reports of beds collapsing or retracting at especially awkward moments.
Best evidence now is that the true progenitor was Captain Edward A. Murphy Jr., a development engineer from Wright Field (Ohio) Aircraft Laboratory. He is said to have produced the law in a moment of exasperation while working at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1949. Captain Murphy was helping to conduct a series of tests in which Colonel John P. Stapp was strapped onto a rocket-powered sled mounted on a track accelerated quickly to high speed and then abruptly halted. The object of the exercise was to improve airplane and flightsuit design by determining just what the human body could tolerate in the way of G-forces.
Present at the creation - and godfather in effect - was George E. Nichols, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasedena. As Mr. Nichols tells the story: “I was project manager at Edwards Air Force Base during Colonel J. P. Stapp’s experimental crash research testing on the track at North Base. The law’s namesake was Captain Ed Murphy . . . Frustration with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error by a lab technician in the wiring of the strain gauge bridges caused Murphy to remark: ‘If there’s any way to do it wrong he will!’ I assigned Murphy’s Law to the statement and the associated variations” (Listener, February 16th 1984).
Slightly longer versions of Murphy’s original complaint also have been recorded e.g. “If there is a wrong way to do something then someone will do it” (Robert L. Forward, ‘Murphy Lives!’ Science 83, January-February 1983) and “If there’s more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster then somebody will do it that way” (People, January 31st 1983).
While the name of the technician has been forgotten, mercifully the basic law has been elaborated in many ways.
The law and many of its variations are paralleled by laws attributed to other individuals both in general (see Fetridge’s Law) and sometimes in word-for-word detail (see Chisholm’s Law of Human Interaction). Precedence in such cases is impossible to determine. The folk may have assigned other people’s laws to Murphy or others may have drawn upon the pool wisdom credited to him.
Still another possibility is that great minds have stumbled onto the same truths independently - something that happens fairly frequently in the history of ideas. Thus, key elements of Murphy’s Laws were foreshadowed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; see Robert Burns’s Law Disraeli’s Second Law and Micawber’s Second Law. Or consider the following ad from ca. 1916 for subscriptions to House Beautiful: “The one number you neglect getting is sure to be the one you wouldn’t have missed for the world. Don’t take the chance!” (This was when the magazine cost thirty-five cents a copy and the ’special introductory’ don’t-take-a-chance rates ranged from $1 for five months to $2 for two years.)
Prestidigitators also have long been familiar with the basic principle of Murphy’s Law. The May 1913 issue of The Magic Wand magazine quoted David Devant (stage name of David Wighton 1868-1941), brilliant performer and ingenious deviser of new tricks, as remarking: “There is an old saying among conjurers that it is impossible for a performer to know a trick thoroughly well until everything that can possibly go wrong with it has gone wrong - in front of an audience.”
Murphy’s Law also is known as Sod’s Law. As elucidated in the New Statesman: “Sod’s Law . . . is the force in nature which causes it to rain mostly at weekends, which makes you get flu when you are on holiday, and which makes the phone ring just as you got into the bath” (October 9th, 1970).
Most remarkably, Murphy’s Law also constitutes one of the few links between the everyday world that we perceive with our normal senses and the counter-intuitive world of quantum mechanics, with Murphy’s promise of inevitability meshing nicely with the subatomic rule that “Whatever isn’t forbidden is required”; see Gell-Mann’s Dictum.
The following list of Murphy’s laws does not pretend to be complete but it is representative of those ascribed to him and casts them in a more or less logical order.
First Corollary to Murphy’s First Law. Of the things that can’t go wrong some will.
Second Corollary to Murphy’s First Law. If everything seems to be going well, you’ve obviously overlooked something. See also Kerr’s Law.
Third Corollary to Murphy’s First Law. If two or more things can go wrong, the one that will go wrong first is the one that will cause the most damage. See also Koppett’s First Law and Rudin’s Law.
Fourth Corollary to Murphy’s First Law. It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Fifth Corollary to Murphy’s First Law. No matter what goes wrong, there’s always someone who will say he knew it would.
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