[Ads-l] minor Murphy's Law note

[Stephen Goranson]

Though many online sites repeat the mistaken origin story involving Edward Murphy at Muroc Army Air Field (now called Edwards AFB) no earlier than June, 1949, Howard Percy "Bob" Robertson, mathematician and physicist at Cal Tech spoke of Murphy's Law earlier that year. (Maybe curiously, Cal Tech in Pasadena is only 60 miles away from Edwards, as the crow flies.)
Psychologist Anne Roe published the interview in Genetic Psychology Monographs, May 1951, page 204. The interview time and identity of the interviewee were revealed by documents at Cal Tech archive and Roe papers in American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Robertson said:
....Murphy's law "If anything can go wrong it will." I always liked Murphy's law. I was told that by an architect.

So Robertson liked the law for some time. (His letters at Cal Tech archive might mention the law before 1949. Hint, Californians.) In 1866 (July 16) Augustus De Morgan wrote "....what-ever can happen will happen if we make trials enough." I had assumed that a rephrasing of De Morgan was assigned to a real or imagined Murphy. Possibly against that: Robertson and his former teacher, then colleague, biographer of mathematicians E. T. Bell (aka John Taine, science fiction writer) certainly at least knew who De Morgan was, even if they forgot (?) his quote.

In 2021 Mark Liberman posted on Murphy's Law, "Which Murphy?" here
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=51464
This introduced me to Orlando J. Murphy, who helped develop a secret, classified, communication apparatus during World War II. A colleague wrote about him. I was slow to recognize its possible importance, fixated on a notion that the name Murphy was a misunderstanding of Augustus De Morgan.
What seemed to be a sticking point was that Robertson, deeply involved in the scientific war effort, including encrypted communications, and knowing the key players, attributed his learning of the saying to an "architect." But in terms of "people who designed electronic circuits" Orlando Murphy was an architect!

On the other other hand, in context of speaking to Anne Roe, Robertson was responding to an image of a building
Roe had shown him, so she presumably didn't get any possible electronic circuit sense.

So. Not Edward Murphy in 1949, the origin. But when and where Robertson picked it up still to be researched, maybe.

Stephen Goranson


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