On the morning of an important presentation, the printer always jams, and whenever you are in a hurry to get out the door, the traffic lights turn red one after another. When things go wrong at precisely the most awkward moment like this, people often think of one particular law. That is ‘Murphy's Law.’
Put simply, Murphy's Law is the rule of thumb that ‘anything that can go wrong will eventually go wrong.’ Today it is used like a joke to lament an unlucky day, but the place where the phrase first appeared was a U.S. Air Force test site where human lives were at stake.
In this piece we will look in turn at the background from which Murphy's Law was born, the meaning it originally carried, why it feels as if it happens only to you, and the design wisdom that turns the law on its head.
The Wisdom of Preparation Hidden in the Law of Bad Luck
Where Did Murphy's Law Begin?
The name Murphy's Law comes from the American aerospace engineer Edward Murphy (Edward A. Murphy Jr.). Accounts of exactly what happened differ slightly from one testimony to another, but the starting point is generally said to be an incident during rocket sled experiments between 1948 and 1949.
(1) Sensors Wired Backward
The Air Force's MX981 project at the time was led by the military physician John Stapp (John Paul Stapp), and it used rocket sleds brought to a sudden stop to find out how much deceleration a person could withstand. To measure the forces on the body accurately, Murphy brought measuring sensors that attached to the harness. But the test produced a reading of zero, and it turned out that some of the sensors had been wired backward. It is said that Murphy's grumbling at that moment, to the effect that “if there is a way to do it wrong, someone will do it that way,” was the origin of the name.
(2) Spreading Through a Press Conference
Shortly afterward, at a press conference, Stapp credited this law as the secret behind the fact that no one had been seriously injured in the dangerous experiments. His explanation was that they had considered and prepared for every possible way things could go wrong in advance. Later, in 1977, Arthur Bloch published a book collecting all sorts of variations, and Murphy's Law became famous around the world. Similar ideas, however, had existed long before: in 1877 a British engineer wrote that at sea, anything that can go wrong eventually does go wrong, and in 1908 a British magician also wrote that on special occasions, such as the day a new trick is first performed, everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Its Original Meaning Was Preparation, Not Pessimism
Today Murphy's Law is often used as a resigned remark along the lines of ‘why am I so unlucky?’ But the original meaning that came out of the test site was closer to the opposite.
- Design Warning: If there are several ways to do something and one of them leads to a serious accident, someday someone will choose that way.
- Maintenance Lesson: In 1955, an aviation maintenance newsletter introduced this law with the sentence ‘If a part can be installed incorrectly, someone will install it that way.’
- Preparedness Principle: As Stapp said, if you write down every way things could go wrong and block them one by one, even a dangerous experiment can be carried out safely.
In other words, Murphy's Law was less a phrase blaming human error than an engineer's warning to eliminate the very gaps in which mistakes can happen. For their role in spreading this name, Stapp, Murphy, and George Nichols, an engineer who worked with them at the time, jointly received the Ig Nobel Prize, awarded for unusual research, in 2003.
Why Does It Seem to Happen Only to Me?
The feeling that moments when things go wrong come especially often owes a great deal to illusions created by our memory and attention.
We Only Notice When It Is Inconvenient
The biologist Richard Dawkins gave the example of aircraft noise interrupting film shoots. Planes are always flying in the sky, but we only notice them when their sound gets mixed into a shoot and causes trouble. Days when things go smoothly do not stay in our memory while days when things go wrong linger, so we come to believe that bad luck is more frequent.
With Enough Attempts, Even Rare Things Happen
The statistician David Hand explains that if the number of attempts is large enough, even rare events are bound to happen sooner or later. For someone who meets dozens of traffic lights every day, a day when they hit red lights one after another will come along naturally as a matter of probability.
Sometimes the Buttered Side Really Does Land Down
The old complaint that toast falling off the table lands buttered side down actually became the subject of experiments. The British physicist and science writer Robert Matthews showed that toast sliding off the edge of a table of ordinary height turns only about half a rotation before reaching the floor, so the buttered side tends to face down, and he received the Ig Nobel Prize in 1996 for this research. There have also been experiments in which toast tossed into the air landed on each side about half the time, so it is a matter of the conditions under which it falls rather than luck.
How to Turn Murphy's Law on Its Head
If anything that can go wrong eventually does go wrong, the solution is to reduce the ways things can go wrong from the start. This is called defensive design, and examples are easy to find all around us.
(1) Making Mistakes Impossible
British sockets and plugs are shaped so that they can only be plugged in one way. Poka-yoke, widely used in Japanese manufacturing, follows the same idea: it prevents mistakes at the source by making it impossible to fit a part in the wrong direction at all.
(2) Catching Mistakes Early
Just as a sign-up screen immediately alerts you when you type letters into the phone number field, software filters out invalid input in advance. Adding one more checking step like this makes it possible to stop a small mistake before it grows into a serious accident.
(3) Making Things Hold Up Even When They Go Wrong
Backing up important files in several places and allowing plenty of time before you set off are also ways of preparing for Murphy's Law. If another path remains even when one thing goes wrong, bad luck ends up as a mere mishap.
There is also ‘Yhprum's Law,’ which turns Murphy's Law upside down. As its name, Murphy spelled backward, suggests, it holds the optimistic view that anything that can go right will eventually go right. Both laws are alike in urging us to weigh the possibilities in advance rather than leaving the outcome to luck.
When a day comes on which things go wrong, calmly checking where the gaps were, rather than blaming the world, is what changes the next time.
Anticipating and preparing for what could go wrong is the first step toward the wisdom of turning bad luck into skill.
