Edward Aloysius Murphy, Jr. was an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems. He is best-known for Murphy's law, which is said to state, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1918, Murphy was the eldest of five children. After attending high school in New Jersey, he went to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1940. The same year he accepted a commission into the United States Army, and undertook pilot training with the United States Army Air Corps in 1941. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theatre in India, China and Burma (now known as Myanmar).