Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we just not noticing it. 99% invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. Hostural and Mars asks questions like, why do we use the belief sound to cover up inappropriate words on radio and TV? Why are house plans having a moment right now?
And why is the punctuation mark the M dash caught up in a fight about AI? 99% invisible will answer all this and more every Tuesday. If you like to hold her in, I know you will like 99% invisible, I'll show that I love and it feels like kind us. We have a lot of the same sensibility and curiosity so much so that often when we're thinking about a topic here, we actually check to see if 99% invisible has already done it.
Because if they have, we know they have done such a good job, we just have to back off. But our loss in that instance is absolutely your game. Follow and listen to 99% invisible wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast contains explicit language.
There's a place out in Mojave Desert, and words Air Force Base. After World War II, it became the desolate hub of the dawning of the Dead Age. The place where we army heads best at test pilots to do the incredibly dangerous work of trying out a whole new generation of experimental aircraft. In 1947, it's where the pilot Chuck Eager first cracked the sound barrier.
Eventually, it's where others achieve unprecedented speeds over 4,000 miles per hour, six times the speed of sound. It's where pilots with high is 100,000 feet, right to the edge of outer space. There's over 40 different types of jets were tested out for the first time, and there's where dozens die in the process. Tom Wolf is booked the right stuff, but the early years of the space program describes Edwards like this.
The place was utterly primitive, nothing but bare bones, leech par paulins, and corrugated tan rickling the heat. A fossil landscape had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. In the summer, the temperature went up to 110 degrees. The sun baked the ground hard, but the lake that became the greatest natural landing fields ever discovered.
It's the kind of story of octave place that assassinated many people. Next park is one of them. Well, I read the book the right stuff before I saw the movie, and just was infatuated with it, just loved all those stories. By the early 2000s, Nick had turned this interest into a job.
He was an associate editor at Wings and Airpower, a magazine about military aviation history, and regularly going up to Edward himself, talking to historian and old test pilots. He was living in Santa Monica, and his neighbor was interested in aviation history too. Nick was on his bring in copies of a magazine. And at one point, he said, well, my father used to work at Edwards Air Force A's, and in fact, he knew Murphy.
And I said, Murphy, who? He said, well, Murphy's law. The guy that came up with Murphy's law. Murphy's law is saying anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
I can almost promise you that in the next few weeks probably even the next few days you'll see a reference to it somewhere out there in the world. Comes up a lot. And I just thought that was crazy story. I mean, I was just listening to it immediately because if there was a Murphy, this is just a mythical Irish figure.
The next day, his neighbor left a book by his front door. And it was entitled Murphy's Law. Here's the interesting thing. The very front of this book, there's a preface.
And it actually has a story in there that kind of jagged with what my neighbor said. And that kind of gave me a little bit of pause. I was like, wow, what if Murphy actually existed? It just appeared like I had a hot lead on some crazy events that happened, you know, 50 years ago.
Why not run with that? This is a coder-ing. I showed up cracking cultural mysteries. I'm a little past him.
Every month we take on a cultural questions, habit, or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. A few months ago, we got an email from a listener. Nick's Park. He told us in 2002 and 2003 he'd gone on a hunt for Murphy's Law and being a documentarian, he brought his tape recorder along.
In this episode, we're going to tag along on its quest to discover the origin of Murphy's Law. From its worth in a secret project at Edwards Air Force Base, through a few about its creation, two world dominance. It's a journey that involves high speed rocket slides, the vagaries of memory, and one extraordinarily sticky concept. It just come to me in keeping with Murphy's Law, something it wasn't quite intended to.
So today, on the coder-ing, where does Murphy's Law come from? These days, Murphy's Law is everywhere. It's on Mugs and T-shirts, on calendars and in pop-up books. It's in the title of TV shows and a movie starring Charles Ronson.
There's a cartoon based on fictional, very unlucky descendant of the original Murphy. And it's common in both regular conversation and scripted dialogue. Like in this video, in this video, from a recent episode of Grey's Anatomy, which I just learned, it garbled the history quite a bit. In 1949, Edward Murphy conducted a rocket slide experiment to see how much pressure human being could withstand a neurophysic spirit failed, so I've tabulated it over and over.
Needless to say, he didn't start off on right foot. That's why it's called Murphy's Law. Because if anything can go wrong, it will. In order to understand how Murphy's Law became the secret of what has any to give you some background, set the scene, tell you about a secret research project happening at Edwards Air Force Base in the late 1940s.
Because this project is where Murphy's Law comes from. Nick Sparkian. During World War II, when the advancement of airplanes was really, and they're just incredibly rapid advance in aviation, there were some questions actually that were brought out about the human factor. They had a lot of data about the strength of aluminum and the power of airplane engines, things like this, but nobody really fully understood what the impact of traveling at high speed, high altitude on the human body might be.
And one of the things that really became kind of startling was the lack of data that anybody had about the human body's capability to withstand g-force. Okay, so when you're in the car and it stops abruptly, rapidly accelerating and you pitch forward, the pressure you feel on your body, that's g-force. If a car going 30 miles an hour slams into a wall, a driver of about 160 pounds wearing a seatbelt, looks very in front of 30 g-force, 30 times the force of gravity. Back in the 1940s, when airplane pilots were starting to go 100 miles per hour, it was widely believed that the human body could only withstand 18 g-force.
And so everything was designed in these airplanes around that concept, so the seat of an aircraft, critically, might have been designed with stand 18 g-force, so you could imagine if somebody crash landed an airplane and they exceeded 18 g-force, that seat would fail, it would break loose. There was an assessment that, hey, maybe this person this pilot was killed not because of exceeding the 18 g-limit, but because they're seat broke loose and they hit the windscreen, the instrument panel they were killed. Army brass station in Wright Field, an Army sent Ohio named after the Wright brothers, they become the center of aviation medical research, decided they had to figure out what amount of g-force the human body could actually tolerate. And one of the things they did was to set up a project at Edwards Air Force Base called Mx91.
Mx91 was largely staffed by civilians, but it was headed by an Army doctor who could hold in Wright Field, investing in the sort of research in the first place. Dr. John Paul's staff. John Paul's staff, who would have hired from the Armed Forces at the Colonel, was born in 1910.
He grew up in Bahia Brazil, was not the Methodist missionaries. Drafted in state Army in World War II, he wound up at Wright Field, we read a number of tests to figure out what happened to pilots flying at high altitude and low oxygen situations, but he was also interested in playing in car crashes. In a focusing on the problem of how can we protect people who have a lot of things happen to them on crashes, acceleration and impact injuries. Programmed by a motorbikeography of John Paul's staff called Sonic Land.
What can we do to keep people from dying in what can you believe in what I call the connectivity plague of the sea age? That was extremely skeptical about the 18G limit. He thought the human body could withstand more. He's not to prove this with a series of experiments.
The experiment was as follows. There was a 2000-year narrow gauge railroad track out in the desert. On that track, satellite, they looked kind of like a built up soapbox. Inside that slide, a test subject.
On the back of that slide were rocket engines. The team would fire the rockets. The slide would curl forward, welcome to zero 200 miles an hour and a few seconds, and then just assembly, it would be stopped by powerful brakes and they are pools of water. It was a stopping.
The moment of maximum deceleration, when G4s were at their highest, the team was interested in studying. Originally, Dummies in chimpanzees were supposed to be the test subjects. The staff thought the only way to really learn how G4s affected the human body was to do the test on a human body. Unlike to anyone else's life, he decided he would do the test on himself.
The test is in the atmosphere. He didn't work while he had the innovation. He said, we're going to stop. We're going to stop.
We're going to stop. We're going to stop. That's not lacking right. Going around in 1954.
And you can see that providing the rocket plan. In the middle of the space during deceleration, so it looks like a large invisible hand is smashing into it. We appear in science textbooks for years. From the end of 1947 to the end of 1954, staff wrote on over 30 rockets lights.
Eventually, like 632 miles an hour and feeling 46 years, the highest deforest ever voluntarily experienced. Here he is in another film reel. The slide in what it has to felt like. First of all, it was led to a cough.
And it was like being hit in the back by a freight train. After which my eyeballs hit my eyelids, with such force, that I was seeing red and hearing the lights until the slide came to a stop. They took the equipment off of me. I wasn't feeling very good.
And I felt even worse when I held my eyes open. My fingers were not consistent. That lasted for eight and a half minutes. Did you have any lasting effects?
Not so ever. Well, let's put it this way. The morning after the run, I had a couple of very black eyes. In fact, I might say they were supersonic shiners.
In addition almost looking at his eyesight, he lost feelings in his teeth, broke his wrists and ribs, and suffered intense backing. The tests were also harrowing for his colleagues, who'd enticed with keeping their much in my eyeballs safe. George Nichols was a chief engineer on the MX-91 team, and he became close friends with staff. He spoke with Nick's mark about staff's final rocket slide run.
This last run that he took, he got a condition in that, where his eyes were just totally red. From hemorrhaging, you couldn't see anything. He was like, ah, they're not far for a lifetime. My head and they're mirrors from it.
Well, when I got up to the sled, I saw his eyes. They were just terrible. What to me, it was never no sacrifice on really being injured or losing his eyesight, or certainly no justification for being killed from the deceleration. I didn't want to see it, but he wanted to go, so we set it up and ran it.
Hearing these stories of John Paul's app, I kept wondering, what kind of person does something like this? Well, I'm supposed to say crazy, it was not fake. The death ratio was either dead or death, but the amount was used out of those. Pregrion, step by out of her again.
When step was in college at Baylor, Texas, he made a young one. Phil lost, he was a also an engineer. He's a child. If he died in the car crash, he was what he was called.
And he was in the right room. She was the car that she was in with her parents. She was a driver. And he didn't believe it or not.
He didn't know what he would have died. And he was very thinking, like him, we keep people safe in car crashes. So, he came to the rest of the building on it to focus on his life's work. All of this, step, the rocket's on test.
Step's intense passion for safety research. It's the high-stakes context in which Murphy's law was made even born. Design is everywhere in our lives. Perhaps most importantly, in the places where we just stop noticing it.
99% invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. Post-Roman bars ask questions like, why do we use the belief sound to cover up inappropriate words on radio and TV? Why are houseplants having a moment right now? And why is the punctuation mark the M dash caught up in a fight about AI?
99% invisible will answer all this and more every Tuesday. If you like to quote her, I know you will like 99% invisible. I love and it feels like kindas. We have a lot of the same sensibility and curiosity so much so that often when we're thinking about a topic here, we actually check to see if 99% invisible has already done it.
Because if they have, we know they have done such a good job. We just have to back off. But our loss in that instance is absolutely your game. Follow and listen to 99% invisible wherever you get your podcasts.
So now that we get back to next bar can classify the origins of Murphy's Law. Nick was doing this work in the early ops, or he 50 years after the MX-981 team had done its research. Many of the men who had been on the team had died and the ones were still alive were well into their 70s and 80s. Nick was aware of all of this.
But the window for talking to the men who had personally involved in this mystery was closing. His first move was to follow up on his first lead, his next-door neighbor's father, a man named David Hill Sr., who supposedly knew Murphy. David Hill is a really interesting man. He's sort of slightly slowed down by the effects of Parkinson's disease, but he was one of these people.
He has an engineer and he had a razor sharp mind. He made a very clear recall of events. He turned out David Hill Sr. had also been member of the MX-981 team, an engineer and telemetry specialist.
He told Nick that early on they were having a hard time getting good data off the rocket slide. There was an engineer out at Wrightfield, Captain Edward Murphy, who had developed a nifty strain of gauge transducers. Gages had measured the strain on the rocket slide harness, but they thought would be more accurate. They installed these, uh, strain gauges that Edward Murphy had brought them.
But when they ran the test, they got no data. Instead of getting more accurate, they got no data. When Murphy learned this, he forgot to Edward's investigate. Upon realizing that the gauges had been installed incorrectly, they would go on to work as fine.
He said something approximately like the now-famous Murphy's Law. David Hill Sr. It could be done wrong, so he wasn't done wrong. This all seemed incredibly promising to Nick.
I kind of sat there after listening to David Hill, kind of finishing myself and saying, wow, this really seems actually credible. I really thought this was not going to pan out. And I thought, wow, I had a chance to unravel some of this. But, you know, the frustration is I knew Dr.
John Paul's app was deceased. And the only other lead I really had was the forward to the Murphy's Law book. It was essentially written by this fellow George Nichols. George Nichols, who heard from earlier talking about how upsetting it was to establish bleeding from the eyes, was the chief engineer of the MX-981 team.
You heard from them earlier because Nick tracked him down and I'm going to elaborate on his story. We had an activity going on with a project where there operations team. I'm coming up with different laws. We had a Nicholas Law, and we had a steps that were on Uncle Pertax.
We had a Sunshine Law, and we had quite a few of them. The steps, but the round-up of Pertax one time was the universal aptitude for an aptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle. And the Murphy and the faulty strain gauges entered the picture. And so Murphy was unhappy about what was going on.
And he said, if that guy has any way of doing something wrong, he'll do it wrong. And then Murphy went back to the right field the next day. And that's the last thing we saw in Murphy. So we started talking about what we thought it ought to be.
And our history statement was too long and didn't really fit into the category of a law. And we were just describing some individual. And so we tried many different things and we finally came up with it. It can happen.
And we thought that was catching enough to be a good law. And Nicholas was a version of a movie that almost answered the Murphy's Law. He's a guy who comes in for a few days and leaves. Then his comments get worked out by the group.
Streamline made capture your end up Murphy's Law by Nichols. What George Nichols really wanted to relate to me was the point that Murphy's Law was something that he had named, that he had discovered it. That he named it after Edward Murphy, who made a terrible mistake at Project MX-981. Needless to say, Nichols proprietary feelings about Murphy's Law did not sit that well with Murphy.
Edward Murphy died in 1990. So Nick was confused directly. But he did come across a radio interview where he had done. He said a staff, not Nichols, who named the law.
So I get to talk about that down at the lower. I really made a terrible mistake here. I didn't go really back to voting on putting these things together. And that's what I made to say.
Well, I think with Kennedy for Murphy's Law, I was going to court my book. Because that's what he said. Well, we have a number of other law. I give him a lot of advice.
He said, I think that's that was a down-to-date. We realized what's happened here. And for now, we're going to have things done according to Murphy's Law. That's not the way I think it's happened.
One way to look at this, everyone spoke with generally agrees. The inciting incident was a strain gauge transducers. Murphy said something that wasn't exactly Murphy's Law. And then some member of the MX-981 team turned it into its leader, more famous itself.
They also read on something more philosophical. The statement wasn't inherently pessimistic. George Nichols, yeah. If it can't happen, I don't want it to happen.
It's what reliability and steering is. It's what it's supposed to do. If it can't happen, and the consequences are what I don't want to see, then I got to do something about it. For engineers who are trying to keep their boss from flying off a rocket's lap, or pilot from crashing into a dashboard, or dying upon the ejected high speed from airplane, or astronaut safe hundreds of miles from Earth, anticipating all the ways of thinking go wrong.
It's a way to keep things from going wrong. Instead of being the equivalent of shit happens, Murphy's Law is more like be prepared. But shit does happen. And feelings about who should get credit from Murphy's Law ran very high with Nichols and Murphy.
Instead of treating it like the collaboration it seems to be proprietary claims were made. He had phone calls or exchange territory to stake out. Here's Nick Spark again. You know, what I hadn't appreciated when I first started my quest to discover the origins of Murphy's Law is that I was bringing up something that was essentially the subject of a nasty feud that had lasted over many decades about who was really responsible for discovering Murphy's Law.
The wildest thing about this feud, though, is it might be over nothing. Because there's a distinct possibility that Murphy's Law originated somewhere else entirely. Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we've just not noticing it. 100% invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture.
Host rolling bars ask questions like, why do we use the bleep sound to cover up inappropriate words on radio and TV? Why are house plans having a moment right now? And why is the punctuation mark the M dash caught up in a fight about AI? 90% invisible will answer all this and more every Tuesday.
If you like to hold her in, I know you will like 90% invisible, I love and it feels like kindas. We have a lot of the same sensibility and curiosity as so much so that often when we're thinking about a topic here, we actually check to see if 90% invisible has already done it. Because if they have, we know they have such a good job, we just have to back off. But our loss in that instance is absolutely your gain.
Follow and listen to 99% invisible wherever you get your podcasts. Design is everywhere in our lives. Perhaps most importantly in the places where we just not noticing it. 99% invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture.
Host rolling bars ask questions like, why do we use the bleep sound to cover up inappropriate words on radio and TV? Why are house plans having a moment right now? And why does the punctuation mark be M dash caught up in a fight about AI? 90% invisible will answer all this and more every Tuesday.
If you like to hold her in, I know you will like 90% invisible, I love and it feels like kindas. We have a lot of the same sensibility and curiosity as so much so that often when we're thinking about a topic here, we actually check to see if 90% invisible has already done it. Because if they have, we know they have such a good job, we just have to back off. But our loss in that instance is absolutely your game.
Follow and listen to 99% invisible wherever you get your podcasts. This being an episode about Murphy's Law, we need to consider Murphy's Law, which in this case meant wondering if the site all the agreement in collaboration, the whole thing is just wasn't true. Next bar has the same instinct. I'm a writer and a documentary filmmaker and I always take it heartless phrase that Mark Twain said, the truth is so precious that sometimes it has to be stretched.
But sometimes it's really important to really try to nail down the facts. And I hope to do that with the origin story of Murphy's Law. It turned out to really be impossible because so much time had elapsed since the point that it was allegedly discovered. And I say allegedly discovered because it's not even 100% clear that this is where Murphy's Law came from.
While he was doing his research, Nick on touch with French Appuro, a law librarian at Yale Law School and the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, who had been extremely skeptical of this origin story. A reach back out to Shapiro. Really what we're getting into here is this great distinction between legends and documented historical facts. Human beings have trouble accepting that they want to go for the colorful story.
They want to believe that every quotation, folks in this quotation was invented by Mark Twain. In fact, any time someone tells you Mark Twain said this, the one thing you know is that Mark Twain didn't say that. One of the great examples of that is Murphy's Law, a standard story that originated at Edwards Air Force Base with Edward Murphy and George Nichols and John Cole-Sapp is absolutely not true. There are two ways to think about Murphy's Law.
One is an idea, independent of its name, and that idea of anything that Kangle-Romp will go wrong. It's been around for thousands of years, going back to the Romans. One French Appuro said it's absolutely not true that Murphy's Law originated at Edwards Air Force Base. He's not talking about the idea.
He's talking about a book by a psychologist named Ann Rowe called The Making of a Sinus. This book, which he didn't interviews with dozens of scientists, was published in 1952, but Rowe was starting to conduct interviews in the late 1940s. And according to her papers, in early 1949, she interviewed a physicist who told her about Murphy's Law. But early 1949 is months before Murphy arrived at Edwards Air Force Base.
Stephen Gornsen, a librarian at Duke University, explained all of this to me. And he said, and he said, I've always liked Murphy's Law, which kind of suggested he said it for somewhere. So basically, a man who seemed to have been using Murphy's Law for years popped up months before the NX-91 team supposedly created Murphy's Law. I haven't heard it.
When I first started this, I just wasn't having it. It sounds plausible. But there are so many people who agree on the origins of Murphy's Law. You remember it.
Who were there? Isn't that irrefutable? How can you depict that? Fett on these granular Kille's details.
I said, I'm not going to say that. He said, it seems like there's so many people who are telling the same story. So it's possible that this thing was floating around and up turns this guy named Murphy, and they had something that somehow somebody had got me out. In other words, even if their memory is totally correct, it doesn't necessarily mean that the first time that this statement was called for control.
It's like imagine this guy kept an Edward Murphy. He says the phrase is kind of like an existing phrase. It's already called Murphy's Law. But what if not everyone on the NX-91 team was familiar with that law.
But one of them has really remembered it. Someone on the team might have connected the dots between the two Murphy's not exactly knowingly, or certainly without anyone else knowing it. And suddenly, it would be a new origin story for an existing law. If something like this did happen, that it's not that the NX-91 was too late to fully uncover the origins of Murphy's Law.
It's like it was always too late to uncover the origins of Murphy's Law. Because it's not just a mystery. It's a miscommunication. If everyone who worked on the NX-91 team could be interviewed right now, we still might not know what happened.
And God, isn't that so unsatisfying? And we don't know whether there was a real movie. It's not good because it was a Darn Ginyper, ever, if we're going to have any more of these. But Murphy might have been to the stereotypical Irishman's Law.
It's a tasty origin story all the way around where the NX-91 started from. And I just thought that was a crazy story. I mean, I was just listening to it immediately because if there was a Murphy, this is just a mythical Irish figure. Nick, for his part, is not ready to go there.
I really do think that Murphy's Law came out of these tests because there was a guy there named Murphy. All these engineers were talking constantly about these funny little laws. And you had somebody who was interacting with a press and was a public figure who was doubting these things all the time. Dr.
Stap, who probably is the guy most responsible for getting Murphy's Law out in the world. This last part, the Dr. Stap's role in popularizing Murphy's Law, that's mostly true. So I'm going to turn to that now.
How Murphy's Law, wherever it comes from, conquered the world. After Murphy's visit Edward in 1849, Murphy's Law quickly became an inside joke and sage piece of wisdom within the NX-91 team. And then John Paul Stap transmitted it to the public. During the years of the rocket's let-s-test, Stap became a very famous.
Here he was, this heroic noble, down-to-earth doctor, who not for nothing was also good with the media. In 1954, he would appear on the cover of Time Magazine as a fastest man in the world. He would go on to a future episode of This Is Your Life. There was a bad Hollywood movie based on him called On the Fresh Little Space, which had a scene at dramatizing the final slide test, where Stap almost lost his eyesight.
I guess I'm going to see you in the dark after all. So in 1950, when Stap mentioned Murphy's Law at a press conference, everyone ate it up. Craig Ryan, Stap's by out of her again. Well, the reporters asked him how many minutes he did about a hundred people.
So he said, would you all at work in consideration of Murphy's Law? If anything can't go on in will, that's what he said. And the reporters were the line, and so they kind of grabbed it. They said they'd been to go to anything called the first law.
He was the publically and formerly stated. They got off the daily way from there. The law started to appear in articles, and it can particularly popular on engineers and scientists. It was on sway.
But it got another booth of attention in 1977, when a man named Arthur Block published a book called Murphy's Law. All the reasons everything goes wrong. The collection of aphorisms, dozens of other cute little laws, like Murphy's. It's probably what's most responsible for spreading Murphy's Law around the world.
It's had a dozen spinoffs and been published in 32 countries. It's also the book that makes neighbor left on his doorstep. The one that has a preface containing George Nichols' version of events. The preface came to be his unsolicited nickel throat and letter to block the author, asking if he wanted to know the origins of Murphy's Law.
His explanation is quoted at length in the preface, where he became a breadcrumb, left for Nick to find 30 years later. The book we spoke in John Paul's nap assignment as well, even though staff did not like talking about it. Craig Ryan again. Yeah.
The only one that was talking about his life, that was, if I'm over shadow, but was not working, he didn't think that was the true, that's what he was talking about. That work was really important. In the years after the rocket scientists, that would take all the key learned about safety harnesses and effects of force on the human body and apply them to something else, automobiles. Key learned at something like that, motorized officers would be killed in car crashes and would die in integrated access.
We were losing 50,000 people a year in America. Our roads and highways were smart. We had these cars that were going to be miles an hour. Everyone else was looking at how to include them car crashes.
I'm not going to understand how we could take car crashes, but I'm interested in, is when the other one crash does happen, how can we keep the people inside the car's dying. We're suffering from the injury. That's what it's being, we just talked about the movie's loss of thinking about the light, the light, the light, the light, the light, the light, the light, the light, the light, the light, the light. And you have to be ready for the worst thing to happen always, like, you can't.
So, like, he's saying, like, okay, the worst thing happens, and what do we have prepared for that? And that's where you can tell. It's been like, what's pretend the worst thing to happen at all. And that's what part comes with.
We came up with a little bit into the night of time, we tested our eyes for safety and the time we've had... We need to take these car down these cars, the seatbelt and the cars, and make the door exactly so. It's hard to add to this, eventually, helping lead the creation of the Department of Transportation. In 1966.
He became the number three man there. So the seatbelt and the cars, the seatbelt and the cars, the seatbelt, the seatbelt, and the seatbelt, So, you can understand why for staff, Murphy's Law might not have rated as great a accomplishment. When you're working on an episode of Murphy's Law, you want to make a lot of jokes about things going wrong. And what I'm going to be doing is, if I'm doing accidents, but the one thing I learned from doing this is that I have a really hard time believing in Murphy's Law, like in my bones.
Yes, things can go wrong and they often do. But I move to the world expecting that they'll mostly behave themselves, thinking most problems have potential resolutions. Imagine that every quest can come to a satisfying conclusion that if you uncover enough information, anything can be decoded. It's not true, of course.
And anyways, this really proves that. It's an example of Murphy's Law as we come to understand it in action. It's all about things going wrong. Next barks about to solve this mystery only to five is not 100% solvable.
In the process, you learn how this phrase got twisted from something optimistic into something pessimistic. How it turned to colleagues and collaborators into enemies, how to obscure the heroic man's best work, and how much people want to believe the most colorful tale, not necessarily in the truest. But this story also contained an example of Murphy's Law as it was originally intended in action. But you can keep things from going wrong if you prepare for them.
That's what the MX-91 team did. They didn't just talk about Murphy's Law, think they invented it and popularized it. They started it, heating it, helped them. They took on this huge problem and made headway on it, one backup plan at a time.
They kept staff and other rockets like Ryder Safe. They're working to contribute to the safety of everyone who gets into a car. It's pretty uplifting stuff. But their understanding of the law has faded out so completely.
It seems to me we might be in need of an update. Call it Murphy's Corollary. Things do have a tendency to go wrong, but they don't have to. It's fascinating.
You know, where did this come from? I'm pretty satisfied with the work I did, but, you know, I can't really, you know, I can't ever say that it's like definitive. It's as definitive as anything to be that's as slippery as a whale big. This is Decoderate.
I'm Will Pascan. You can find me on Twitter at Will Pascan. And if you have any cultural mysteries you want to decode, you can email us at Decoderate. If you haven't yet, subscribe and read our feed in Apple podcasts, or ever, you get your podcasts, and even better, tell your friends.
This podcast was written by Will Pascan and was produced edited by Benjamin Fresh, who also dispirations for every episode. Clear11 is our research system. Thanks to Jun Thomas Arthur Block and a very special thanks to Nick Sork, whose book, A History of Murphy's Law, you should buy. Thanks for listening.
We'll see you in February of the year.