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I’m a sucker for strange stories, but stay with me on this one…<\/p>\nI’m a sucker for strange stories, but stay with me on this one…<\/p>\n
I stumbled across this story<\/a> just the other day, about “the fastest man on Earth,” John Paul Stapp<\/a> — who just happens to be a Baylor grad (BA ’31, MA ’32). In the 1940s and ’50s, Stapp was an Air Force colonel working at a research facility studying the effects of rapid deceleration, testing both the strength of seats and harnesses and the human tolerance to the G forces encountered in simulated plane crashes. Unwilling to risk injury to any of his own men, Stapp repeatedly served as his own test dummy over a period of several years (like in the test pictured at right).<\/p>\n In 1955, Stapp was featured on the cover of Time<\/em> magazine<\/a> after he (and the rocket he rode) broke the land speed record. Later in life, he used his research to emphasize the need for seatbelts in cars; when President Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation in 1966 that made seatbelts mandatory, Stapp was in the room.<\/p>\n All of that would be enough for most men, and it was indeed enough of a career that the Baylor Alumni Association included a profile of Stapp in its ongoing “Alumni 150<\/a>” series in the Baylor Line<\/em>. But it’s an almost completely unrelated happenstance that makes Stapp — and Baylor by connection — the answer to a trivia question: “Who coined the term ‘Murphy’s Law<\/a>‘?”<\/p>\n