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11 Jul 05 - 11:19 AM (#1519982) Subject: Happy! - July 11 From: Abby Sale 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 What are Happy's all about? See Clicky |