Reply #2: A friend emailed this list to me this morning and like you I had heard [View All]

...a few of these before, but most were new to me. Glad you enjoyed them.

Actually, I think there is really only one Murphy's Law:

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Murphy's law is a popular adage in Western culture that most likely originated at Edwards Air Force Base in 1948. The Law broadly states that things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance. "If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way." It is most often cited as "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong" (or, alternately, "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time," or, "Anything that can go wrong, will").

Murphy's Law is sometimes confused with Finagle's Corollary, which is also known as Sod's law.

Per the 1948 theory, in American culture the law was named somewhat sarcastically<1><2> by Stapp's Team working on Project MX981 at Edwards Air Force Base after Major Edward A. Murphy, Jr., a development engineer contributing support measurement technology for a brief time on rocket sled experiments done by the United States Air Force in 1948 with inveterate adage collector and the law's undoubted populizer Doctor/Colonel John Paul Stapp, a former next-door neighbor and friend of Murphy.


History of Murphy's LawThe most detailed examination of the origins of the Law is the book A History of Murphy's Law by author Nick T. Spark. Spark concludes that differing recollections years later by various participants make it impossible to pinpoint who exactly coined the phrase. The Law supposedly stems from an attempt to use new measurement devices developed by the eponymous Edward Murphy, and was coined in adverse reaction to something Murphy said when his devices failed to perform and eventually cast into its present form prior to a press conference some months later, the first ever (of many) given by Colonel Stapp, The fastest man on earth.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law