When faced with the impossible, many people will shy away or simply not try at all. Marvin Pipkin didn’t run away from a challenge that was thought to be impossible. He created an item every household has to this day!
As a joke, GE would haze their new employees, asking them to invent frosted light bulbs. This was considered an impossible task at the time. Pipkin refused to believe that.
“When I was fussing around with inside frosting experiments, back in 1919, everybody laughed at me, and kept calling me off to tackle something ‘more practical,'” Pipkin told Popular Science magazine in August 1927. “They told me about the manufacturer who had contracted with the railroads to supply 50,000 inside frosted bulbs, and had begged off on his contract when he found he had 50 percent breakage in his product. Inside frosting was an exploded dream.”
One company’s joke turned into a raging success!