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The Art of

Anticipating

In the 1950s America was flush with possibilities. The
powerful manufacturing engines of World War II had final-
ly been retooled to peacetime needs. Ranch houses, huge
cars, jet airliners, freeways, rockets, and TV had redefined
the face of America. Anything seemed feasible.
In the midst of all this gee-whiz optimism, a TRW engineer
made a memorable and rather cynical presentation. The
speaker recast a quote he had read in Aviation Mechanics
Bulletin: “If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, it
will be.” His new, generic version: “If anything can go
wrong, it will.” That engineer’s last name was Murphy.
r so one of the stories goes. (There are at least five expla-
O nations of “Murphy’s Law.”) Not that the twentieth century
was the first to note that “the best laid schemes of mice and men
often go astray,” as eighteenth-century poet Robert Burns put it.
But as our lives have become increasingly complicated and
reliant on technology, glitches appear to be far more prevalent

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