The Clark-Trimble experiments

A convenient point of departure is provided by the famous Clark-Trimble experiments of 1935. Clark-Trimble was not primarily a physicist, and his great discovery of the Graduated Hostility of Things was made almost accidentally. During some research into the relation between periods of the day and human bad temper, Clark-Trimble, a leading Cambridge psychologist, came to the conclusion that low human dynamics in the early morning could not sufficiently explain the apparent hostility of Things at the breakfast table - the way honey gets between the fingers, the unfoldability of news-papers, etc. In the experiments which finally confirmed him in this view, and which he demonstrated before the Royal Society in London, Clark-Trimble arranged four hundred pieces of carpet in ascending degrees of quality, from coarse matting to priceless Chinese silk. Pieces of toast and marmalade, graded, weighed, and measured, were then dropped on each piece of carpet, and the marmalade-downwards incidence was statistically analysed. The toast fell right-side-up every time on the cheap carpet, except when the cheap carpet was screened from the rest (in which case the toast didn’t know that Clark-Trimble had other and better carpets), and it fell marmalade-downwards every time on the Chinese silk. Most remarkable of all, the marmalade-downwards incidence for the intermediate grades was found to vary exactly with the quality of carpet.

The success of these experiments naturally switched Clark-Trimble’s attention to further research on resistentia, a fact which was directly responsible for the tragic and sudden end to his career when he trod on a garden rake at the Cambridge School of Agronomy. In the meantime, Noys and Crangenbacker had been doing some notable work in America. Noys carried out literally thousands of experiments, in which subjects of all ages and sexes, sitting in chairs of every conceivable kind, dropped various kinds of pencils. In only three cases did the pencil come to rest within easy reach. Crangenbacker’s work in the social-industrial field, on the relation of human willpower to specific problems such as whether a train or subway will stop with the door opposite you on a crowded platform, or whether there will be a mail box anywhere on your side of the street, was attracting much attention.

(From 'Report on Resistentialism' by Paul Jennings)

"Resistentialism has long been used in our family to explain the inexplicable: Why light switches, fixed in place in daylight hours, elude groping hands in darkness. Why shoestrings break when we are in a hurry... The explanation for these and many more daily occurrences is that there is no such thing as an inanimate object.  Seemingly inanimate objects actually resist those they are intended to serve."

Myron A. Marty; Hostile Inanimate Objects Have Their Murphy's Law; St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri); Sep 15, 1996.

"Reports of resistentialism abound in ephemeral literature as well.  The Peter Tamony Collection at the University of Missouri, Columbia, contains dozens of newspaper clippings documenting the phenomenon ...  Among Tamony's clippings is a story about a lady in London whose telephone rang every time she tried to take a bath. No matter what time she drew the bath, day or night, the phone always rang -- and when she'd answer it, nobody was there. Things eventually got so bad that she stopped bathing altogether, which prompted her husband to investigate the problem pronto... In the great scheme of things (think about that one!), Jennings tells us, we are no-Thing, and Things always win."

Charles Harrington Elster; Resistentialism: Things Are Against Us(Including Our Own Words); New York Times Magazine; Sep 21, 2003.