Oscar Eightball

Just how did the Law get out into the world? Well, David Hill says, John Paul Stapp held his first-ever press conference at Edwards a few weeks after The Incident. And he was attempting to explain his research in clinical terms when a reporter asked the obvious question: “How is it that no one has been severely injured — or worse — during your tests?” Stapp, who Hill says could be something of a showman, replied nonchalantly that, “we do all of our work in consideration of Murphy’s Law.” When the puzzled reporters asked for a clarification Stapp defined The Law and stated, as Hill puts it, “the idea that you had to think through all possibilities before doing a test” so as to avoid disaster.

According to Hill, that was a defining moment. Whether Stapp realized it or not, Murphy’s Law neatly summed up the point of his experiments. They were, after all, dedicated to trying to find ways to prevent bad things — aircraft accidents — from becoming worse. As in fatal. But there was a more significant meaning that went to the very core of the mission of the engineer. From day one of the tests there had been an unacknowledged but standard experimental protocol. The test team constantly challenged each other to think up “what ifs” and to recognize the potential causes of disaster. If you could predict all the possible things that could go wrong, the thinking went, you could also find a way to prevent catastrophe. And save John Stapp’s neck.

If anything can go wrong, it will. It was a concept that seized the cumulative imagination at the press conference. So when articles about the Gee Whiz showed up in print, Murphy’s Law was often cited right along with Newton’s Second.

“I didn’t think here’s some profound statement that been made that will shock The World,” says Hill, expressing amazement that the remark gained such prominence. “It wasn’t made as such. Of course it’s True that if there’s a right way to do something, there’s generally a wrong way to do it also. 

And it’s good to recognise the difference.”