14 January 2022
Murphy’s Law is a jocular principle that is commonly stated as “if anything can go wrong, it will.” The so-called law is often said to have been created by Captain Edward A. Murphy, an engineer at Muroc Army Airfield (known today as Edwards Air Force Base) in 1949. But Captain Murphy was not the originator of the principle or phrasing—those were in use long before 1949. Captain Murphy may have bequeathed his name to the law, but even that is in doubt.
The principle stated by Murphy’s Law dates to ancient times. The Roman playwright Plautus (c.254–184 BCE) penned words to that effect in his play Mostellaria:
insperata accidunt magis saepe quam quae speres
(Things you don’t hope for happen more often than things you do hope for.)
A statement closer to the usual wording of Murphy’s Law today appears in the Economist on 22 March 1862 in a passage referring to how lawyers view the prospects of a business venture’s success:
But the lawyer does not see the whole of mercantile life. He sees only the failures. There is a “hitch,” as he calls it, in every case which comes before him. His instinct, therefore, is that business as a rule fails,—that what can go wrong will go wrong,—that every opening for fraud will be filled with fraud,—that a merely moral obligation is, as Lord Wensleydale concisely observed, “nothing,”—that all who can cheat will cheat, and all who do not cheat cannot cheat.
And fifteen years later the principle was being applied to steamships. From an article by Alfred Holt in the 1877–78 Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers:
It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later, so it is not to be wondered that owners prefer the safe to the scientific. It is also found that it is almost as bad to have too many parts as too few; that arrangements which are for exceptional and occasional use are rarely available when wanted, and have the disadvantage of requiring additional care. Their very presence, too, seems in effect to indispose the engineer to attend to essentials. Sufficient stress can hardly be laid on the advantages of simplicity. The human factor cannot be safely neglected in planning machinery. If attention is to be obtained, the engine must be such that the engineer will be disposed to attend to it.
In June 1908, British magician Nevil Maskelyne stated the principle thusly in the magazine Magic Circular:
It is an experience common to all men to find that, on any special occasion, such as the production of a magical effect for the first time in public, everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
The next year, one of Maskelyne’s stage partners, David Devant, wrote the following:
The conjurer does not really know a trick thoroughly until everything that can possibly go wrong with it has gone wrong, and unfortunately this knowledge can be acquired only by experience in front of audiences.
And there is this, which appeared in an article about boat engines in the magazine Country Life on 6 April 1929:
For my own part, I always have the water pump overhauled before making any attempt to start the engine, assuming with cautious pessimism that what can go wrong will do so, and that it is desirable to have such things rectified at the beginning.
So, the general principle articulated by Murphy’s Law was well established in many fields of endeavor by the early twentieth century. But where does Murphy come in? This question leads us to the tale of Captain Edward A. Murphy. He was an engineer working on experiments to test the effects of high-g deceleration on the human body, tests supervised by Colonel John Stapp, MD. Basically, test subjects, including Stapp, rode a rocket sled that was rapidly decelerated. Murphy was responsible for the sensors on the body’s harness that recorded test data. On one test in 1949, the sensors failed to record data, and Murphy discovered that one of the technicians had wired them incorrectly. According to the story, this mistake led Murphy to observe that if there was a wrong way to do it, that technician would do it that way. Allegedly, at a subsequent press conference—Stapp’s tests were widely reported by the media—one of the supervisors, in some accounts Stapp himself, credited Murphy with coming up with the principle. But if this story about the press conference is true, no researcher has found any evidence of a press conference where Stapp or a member of his team made a reference to Murphy’s Law or even to the general principle.
The earliest published reference to Murphy’s Law being uttered by Stapp or one of his team is in Lloyd Mallan’s 1955 Men, Rockets and Space Rats:
Major Simons shakes his head. He remembers Colonel Stapp’s favorite takeoff on sober scientific laws—Murphy’s Law, Stapp calls it—“Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong.”
It seems likely that Stapp’s team did indeed jokingly refer to the principle as Murphy’s Law. The question is whether Captain Murphy gave his name to the already established principle, or whether it was already called being referred to as Murphy’s Law and the captain coincidentally bearing the same name was part of the joke. We don’t have any pre-1949 instances of Murphy’s Law, so that gives credence to the idea that the name originated with the captain. But the first recorded uses of the phrase come shortly afterward and are in fields far removed from the test-bed at Muroc/Edwards.
The first absolutely certain instance of Murphy’s Law is in an paper by Anne Roe in the May 1951 issue of Genetic Psychology Monographs. Rowe records this story told by a physicist. The story is being related in the context of being shown an image of two people and being asked to tell a story about it. On seeing the picture, the physicist responded:
Oh, my God. There was once an artist who yearned to be a great architect and to build churches and other monuments which would be a true decoration to the Mediterranean civilization in which he lived. As he studied more and more he became interested in the details of the great edifices which he had planned to erect and finally discovered that these meant more to him than the cold architectural drawings in which he had been originally most interested. He ended up by designing statutes of saints who were of a particular nature which stood in the corners of the churches built to his plan by someone else and gradually became covered with the dust which was to the best interests of the people who came there. As for himself he realized that this was the inexorable working of the second law of thermodynamics which stated Murphy’s law “If anything can go wrong it will.” I always liked Murphy’s law, I was told that by an architect.
The physicist’s framing of Murphy’s Law as a corollary to the second law of thermodynamics hints at a different origin than Stapp’s team at Muroc/Edwards. Roe does not give the dates when her data was collected, but given the size of the study, it was likely collected over the course of a year or more. The 8 February 1951 date of submission of the monograph to the journal indicates that it was being written in 1950, which would push the probable date of data collection to 1949, around the time Captain Murphy was working on Stapp’s team. While the transfer of the phrase from Stapp’s team to the physicist in Roe’s study cannot be ruled out, the dates and the physicist’s attribution of the term to an architect make it unlikely. The evidence in Roe’s paper indicates that the phrase Murphy’s Law was already in use in 1949 when the engineers at Muroc/Edwards joked about Captain Murphy.
Roe also uses the phrase several times in a 1952 book about her study, but the name Murphy’s Law starts frequently appearing in print in 1956. By that year it had been adopted as a mantra by the military aviation safety community. We get this from the MATS Flyer of January 1956:
MURPHY’S LAW
“If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, someone will install it that way.” (Aviation Mechanics Bulletin)
I have been unable to locate the Aviation Mechanics Bulletin referred to here.
The first use of the phrase in the mainstream media is from the same month. From an article on aircraft safety in the New York Times of 22 January 1956:
Flight safety engineers, struggling with problems that multiply daily with mass air transportation, quote a tenet known simply as Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”
And the US Navy’s aviation safety magazine, Approach, starts a regular column titled Murphy’s Law. From the April 1956 issue:
Murphy’s Law: “If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, someone will install it that way.”—Flight Safety Foundation Aviation Mechanic’s Bulletin.
And from the November 1956 issue, which also calls a mistake a Murphy or a Murphy factor:
MURPHY’S LAW
*If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, someone will install it that way.
MURPHY IN J65 ENGINE FUEL CONTROL
The pilot of an A4D-1 was at 1000 feet when an unknown pilot of another aircraft in the air broadcast that flames were visible around the aft section of the A4D’s fuselage. The A4D pilot promptly shut down the engine and executed a landing on an airfield.
A Murphy factor in the Model TJ-L2 fuel control of the aircraft’s J65 engine was determined to have caused this in-flight fire. The O-ring seal, part number R33-P-1550-3232, was put against the cover face instead of in the machined groove located 1/4-inch from the inner end of the cap for the packing O-ring.
Cases of in-flight fires involving this Murphy have also been reported in J-65-equipped FJ-3 and -4 model aircraft.
And in the 1962 book Into Orbit, written by the seven Mercury astronauts, John Glenn credits this naval Murphy as the progenitor of the phrase:
We blamed human errors like this on what aviation engineers call “Murphy’s Law.” “Murphy” was a fictitious character who appeared in a series of educational cartoons put out by the U.S. Navy to stress aviation safety among its maintenance crews. In the cartoons, Murphy was a careless, all-thumbs mechanic who was prone to make such mistakes as installing a propeller backwards or forgetting to tighten a bolt. He finally became such an institution that someone thought up a principle of human error called Murphy’s Law. It went like this: “Any part that can be installed wrongly will be installed wrongly at some point by someone.”
The column’s header in Approach did include a drawing of a person, presumably the eponymous Murphy, and this may be the “cartoon” that Glenn, a Marine aviator and undoubtedly a reader of Approach, refers to. But it’s a stretch to call the column a cartoon. The column consists of text and photos. There may be a cartoon version, but if so, I haven’t found it.
What can we glean from all this? First, the principle behind Murphy’s Law existed long before Captain Edward Murphy. It is possible that the good captain lent his name to the principle, but there is indirect evidence that the term Murphy’s Law was already in use before the captain came along.
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