Quote:
Originally posted by icy_ca
I knew Murphy was an engineer, maybe he was in the corps. first.
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Edward A. Murphy was an engineer, and also a captain in the USAF. He designed a harness to attatch to test pilots, with 16 accelerometers in various places. As fate would have it, there were 2 ways to install each of those accelerometers.
One day Major John Paul Strapp was wearing the harness in a test in a rocket sled on Murdoc (now Edwards) base, where he pulled about 40G. When he got out of the sled, he asked a technician what the readings on the accelerometers were. The technician said 'Zero'.
Needless to say, Strapp was not impressed. Murphy was called out, and saw that every one of the 16 accelerometers had been installed in the harness backward. He then said his immortal words:
If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of them will cause a catastrophe, someone will do it that way.
It's a good engineering principle, and it stuck. It was used the next day in a debreifing on the failed rocket sled experiment, and quickly gained momentum.
As an aside, most people think that Murphy's law is
If anything can go wrong, it will. That is, in fact, Finnagle's law, not Murphy's.