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From: mauney@ncsu.UUCP (Jon Mauney)
Newsgroups: net.books,net.nlang,net.jokes.d
Subject: Re: Murphy's Laws
Message-ID: <2717@ncsu.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 6-Nov-84 08:52:34 EST
Article-I.D.: ncsu.2717
Posted: Tue Nov  6 08:52:34 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Nov-84 04:28:51 EST
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Organization: N.C. State University, Raleigh
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> There have been several notes on the net recently about a book,
> "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown", a collection of
> Science Humor edited by Robert A. Baker, and published in 1963 by
> Prentice-Hall.  So I got it out of the library to reread.  The very
> first piece presents a number of "laws" that I am sure you will
> recognize:
> 
> 	If anything can go wrong, it will.
> 	If anything just can't go wrong, it will anyway.
> 	...
> 
> The author of this piece, Francis P. Chisolm, describes these as
> CHISOLM'S LAWS.  His piece is republished from something entitled
> "Motive" (no date given), and the piece is called "The Chisolm Effect".
> 
> Today we know these (universally?) as Murphy's laws.
> 
> When did Murphy become the author?  Is Chisolm the real author?  How
> did he come to be forgotten?  Why isn't he (or why aren't his heirs)
> fighting to recover his authorship?  Could it be (as my daughter
> Naomi suggested) that: SOMETHING WENT WRONG?
> 

If you look again at The Chisholm Effect, you will see that Chisholm
cites Murphy's Law : "It anything can go wrong, it will happen during
a demonstration".  Chisholm expands this idea.  In the absence of other
information, we can conclude that Murphy's Law is older and more restricted
that Chisholm's.  "Murphy's Law" has a better ring to it though, so when 
commercial interests started running this joke into the ground with
"Murphy's Law of Pencil Sharpeners" and
"Murphy's Law of Asynchronous Distributed Computing"
they called them all Murphy's Laws.


> If the _A_Stress_Analysis_of_a_Strapless_Evening_Gown_ article about "Chisolm's
> Laws" has a copyright date of 1958, then they are still Murphy's Laws.  Murphy
> formulated his laws much earlier, ('40's ?) while he was doing something like
> blowing up missiles at Redstone for some branch of the government. There is a
> thin book about Murphy's Laws which has a description of how he came up with
> them. 

I don't know who Murphy was, but I wouldn't believe anything I read in
a book about Murphy's Laws.  In any case, you can bet that Murphy 
(if indeed there ever was a Murphy)
had nothing to do with most of the statements attributed to him.
-- 

Jon Mauney,    mcnc!ncsu!mauney
North Carolina State University

Mauney's Law:  If a good idea can be ruined, it will be.
Corollary:     People will buy it.