During the late 1940s, Edward A. Murphy (1918 - 1990) was research and development officer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. In 1949, Murphy took part in Air Force Project MX-981, set up to investigate the effects of rapid deceleration of humans. To record the effects on the volunteers who took part, Murphy devised a harness carrying strain gauges to measure the forces generated in each run. During one such run, everything seemed to go well - but the harness had failed to record any data. Murphy was called in, and discovered that every single strain gauge had been wired up incorrectly. He told his colleagues that this highlighted a very important rule that all engineers should bear in mind: if there are two ways of doing something, and one of them can lead to disaster, you should assume that's the way it will be done.
Murphy wanted his rueful observation to be seen as a useful design principle. Instead, at a press conference held to describe the results of the project, a journalist turned Murphy's Law into a joke about life in general: "If something can go wrong, it will go wrong". Murphy wasn't very happy about how the media had twisted the meaning of his very sensible design principle - but there wasn't much he could do. And of course, by losing control over his principle, Murphy himself became a victim of his very own law!
