What can possibly go wrong?

Murphy's Law emerged in its modern form no later than 1952, as an epigraph to a mountaineering book by Jack Sack, who described it as an "ancient mountaineering adage":Anything that can possibly go wrong, does.

But there are other variations.

The following article about its origin 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) who rode a sled on the deceleration track to a stop, pulling 40 Gs, 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 was born.

The Northrop project manager, George E. Nichols, had a few laws of his own. Nichols' Fourth Law says, "Avoid any action with an unacceptable outcome."

The doctor, well-known Col. John P. Stapp, had a paradox: Stapp's Ironical Paradox, which says, "The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle."

Nichols is still around. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, he's the quality control manager for the Viking project to send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars.
Another alternative origin to Murphy's Law attributes the saying to an accident. Although unsubstantiated, it has been discussed and asserted by former colleagues of the person named Murphy in this account.

To wit: Ben Murphy, in the mid 1930s, was a radio broadcasting engineer who was often sent on assignment to provide technical support for remote radio broadcasts. Supposedly, he worked for the Pacific regional division of the (then) NBC radio network. Murphy, an assistant, and an announcer were sent on assignment to the area of Capistrano, California to broadcast live via special telephone line hookup, the famous and annual return of the Cliff Swallows (small birds) to that area from their winter migration to Argentina. A noted phrase evoked by this regular migratory habit was coined: "as reliable as the return of the swallows to Capistrano".

After lugging heavy electronic equipment up a small hillside, stringing hundreds of feet of communications cabling, being soaked by unexpected rainfall, beset by angry townspeople, stung by various insects and generally being harassed by nature and humans alike, Murphy and his companions were attempting to plant a microphone in the rock cliffs surrounding the town of San Juan Capistrano in order to capture the sound of the beating of thousands of birds' wings as the swallows returned to make their summer nests. Murphy lost his footing and tumbled down the cliff to a small flat area. Although alive, he was injured, breaking several bones and sustaining multiple scrapes and other wounds.

He was rescued and transported to hospital, and en route he learned that they had missed the annual event by several days; the birds had returned and had made their nests a week earlier, so all Murphy's hard work and subsequent injuries were essentially in vain.

Ben Murphy was supposedly overheard to say (in response to comments from his two fellow broadcasters) that: "If anything could have gone wrong with this assignment, it sure did!"

Although no further mention is ever made in radio broadcasting annals, Murphy is said to have survived and continued to work for NBC as a remote broadcast engineer until his retirement, some time in the 1950s.


Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law
http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-true.html