Who the Heck is Murphy Anyway?

Most of us are familiar with Murphy’s Law – “If anything can go wrong, it will.”  I’ll bet it’s happened to you more than once.  But who the heck was he?

I found several versions of the origin of Murphy, but most agreed in some form with the following:

Captain Edward A. Murphy was an air force engineer who worked at Edwards Air Force base on a 1949 project studying how much sudden deceleration a person can stand.  During the experiments, 16 accelerometers were mounted to a human subject’s body to measure impact during a crash.  Upon discovering that a technician had installed all 16 incorrectly, Murphy exclaimed angrily, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”  Murphy’s comment was quoted at a press conference and due to its nugget of universal truth, a generic form of the “law” quickly spread.  It made it to the dictionary in 1958.

I’ll bet Murphy never imagined  his casual statement would someday become a universal truth!  His comment inspired a host of other laws, not actually spoken by Murphy, but now attributed to him in the category of quotes that symbolize our error prone nature known as Murphy’s Laws.

• Nothing is ever as simple as it first seems.
• Everything you decide to do costs more than first estimated.
• Every activity takes more time than you have.
• It’s easier to make a commitment or to get involved in something than to get out of it.
• Whatever you set out to do, something else must be done first.
• If you improve or tinker with something long enough, eventually it will break.
• By making something absolutely clear, somebody will be confused.
• You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s sufficient.
• If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
• Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
• Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.
• The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
• The buddy system is essential to your survival; it gives the enemy somebody else to shoot at.
• Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.
• The opulence of the front office decor varies inversely with the fundamental solvency of the firm.
• Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he’ll have to touch to be sure.
• The first myth of management is that it exists.