Captain Edward A. Murphy, Jr., was an engineer at Edwards Air Force Base in the United States. In 1949, he was working on a machine to measure the heartbeat and breathing of pilots. But something was malfunctioning in the equipment as the result of human error. Murphy blamed the lab technician and said, "if there is any way to do it wrong, he will." One person's failure can bring a whole project crashing down. And Murphy's Law view was that some failure or something negative will typically happen. Murphy's phrase bacame popular in all areas to expain the failures of everyday things.