In the earliest laboratory notebooks, the wall-mounted mechanism shown in this image was simply called “the pinball machine.” In the published output of the research program of which it was a part, it went by the more dignified appellation Random Mechanical Cascade, yielding a catchy acronym: RMC. Around the lab, however, the device was known affectionately as Murphy, since if anything could go wrong, it would. In a way, of course, this was exactly the point: the whole system—the nine thousand polystyrene balls dropping through a pegboard of 330 precisely cantilevered nylon pins, the real-time photoelectric counters tallying (by LED readout) the segmented heaps forming below, the perennially balky bucket-conveyor for resetting an experimental run—had all been painstakingly constructed and calibrated in order first to exemplify, and then to defy, what the Victorian statistician Francis Galton dubbed the “Law of Frequency of Error.”
more from D. Graham Burnett at Cabinet here.