Happy! - July 11 (Murphy's Law)

Subject: Happy! - July 11
From: Abby Sale
Date: 11 Jul 05 - 11:19 AM


Happy Birthday!

Colonel/Dr John Paul Stapp

was born July 11, 1910
(d11/13/1999)

Stapp was The Fastest Man on Earth during his air force, jet sled studies in human deceleration. He perfected and widely promoted the three point auto seatbelt and invented the auto crash test dummy. He is credited with many lives saved as a result. He is important, however, as the man to whom Edward A. Murphy (1918-1989) said, in 1949, something like "if there's any way they can do it wrong, they will."

Seems he said it after Capt. Murphy installed some test gauges incorectly and was blaming another. Stapp reformulated this as: "If anything can go wrong, it will" and named it "Murphy's Law." There were a lot of such Laws at Northrop at the time. Stapp later explained, as an engineer/scientist, "the idea was that you had to think through all possibilities before doing a test" so as to avoid disaster. We know that these men and the notion coincided there/then. Details are controversial. See The Fastest Man on Earth by Nick T. Spark.

Copyright © 2005, Abby Sale - all rights reserved
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