Nick T. Spark is an American documentary filmmaker and writer. Films he has written, directed or produced include Regulus: The First Nuclear Missile Submarines (2001) and the Emmy award winning The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club (2009). In addition to being a contributing editor to Wings and Airpower magazines, his articles have appeared in the Annals of Improbable Research, Naval History, the Journal of the American Aviation Historical Society, and Proceedings. People he has interviewed include President Gerald Ford, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and numerous test pilots including Charles "Chuck" Yeager. In 2007 Spark was interviewed on National Public Radio, concerning an article he wrote about the USS Panay incident.
Spark is probably most well known for the four-part article Why Everything You Know About Murphy's Law Is Wrong, [1] detailing the history of Murphy's law. This article, which Spark later adapted into a short book, explains the genesis of the popular adage which apparently originated at Edwards Air Force Base during the United States Air Force's Project MX981 to research high g-force issues in 1947–1949 under the direction of "The Bravest Man in the Air Force", physicist and medical doctor John Stapp.
Spark attended the University of Arizona as a Flinn scholar, from which he received a degree in creative writing with a minor in media arts. While at the University of Arizona, he made Just Puttering Around, a 1992 documentary about octogenarian folk artist William Holzman, [2] for which the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded him a 1992 student Emmy Award. He then attended the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television where he received a Masters of Fine Arts degree (MFA) in film production. Subsequently, he received a second student Emmy Award and the Cine Golden Eagle (a forty-eight-year biannual film-and-video competition recognizing excellence in film and video [3]), both for the documentary Upholding the Promise, a film about federal judges.