Who is Murphy of Murphy's Law?

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Why: Martin walked in on some girl stealing his cereal, but she said she had never done it before and it was just "Sod's Law" that she got caught (because that is one of those hilarious things British people say).

Answer: Here's the legend, excerpted from The Desert Wings, March 3, 1978:

Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will") was born at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 at North Base. It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash.

One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it."

The contractor's project manager kept a list of "laws" and added this one, which he called Murphy's Law. Actually, what he did was take an old law that had been around for years in a more basic form and give it a name.

Shortly afterwards, the Air Force doctor (Dr. John Paul Stapp) who rode a sled on the deceleration track to a stop, pulling 40 Gs, gave a press conference. He said that their good safety record on the project was due to a firm belief in Murphy's Law and in the necessity to try and circumvent it. Aerospace manufacturers picked it up and used it widely in their ads during the next few months, and soon it was being quoted in many news and magazine articles. Murphy's Law was born.

"Sod's Law," this website says, has been around for hundreds of years. It has that name "because it would happen to any poor sod who needed such a catastrophic event the least." And goes on:

this original name is dying out because sod over here is a cursory so is not used much. Murphy's on the other hand is nothing insulting or lacking in hope I hope this clears any problems up and while this maybe hard to come to terms with, think about it, would such an obvious piece of logic have only come about in the second half of the 20th century????

Source: Murphys-Law.com

The More You Know: Here is Edward Murphy as a young man, and a little later checking to see if dropped toast does, in fact, always land butter-side down. (JK.)