Marvin Pipkin was a scientist with the United States Army in the early part of the 20th century.

He returned to civilian life in the 1920s and joined General Electric.

When he started at GE, he was given a job that was considered a fool's errand, the supposedly

impossible task of designing a light bulb that could be frosted on the inside to help

diffuse the harsh light of incandescent bulbs.

This assignment was often handed out to new hires as something of a joke, but Marvin

didn't know that the project was considered impossible.

So he said about to solve the problem as if it were possible.

He completed work on the new internally frosted light bulb in 1925.

GE later mass produced it, and the ubiquitous soft white light bulb was born.

What's interesting about this anecdote is what it tells us about the power of our assumptions.

How those assumptions can sometimes be an obstacle to progress and problem solving.

For years, GE assumed that frosting the inside of a light bulb was impossible, and so they

didn't devote real resources to solving the problem.

Instead, they frosted on the outside, using a process that dimmed the light from the bulb

and made the glass fragile and prone to breaking.

If they had made a different assumption, they likely would have found a solution far sooner.

Coming up, I'll share the story of how another set of assumptions nearly ended in disaster

high above the earth.

You'll also hear from my Wharton colleague, organizational psychologist and author Adam

Grant, about how you can apply scientific thinking to improve your everyday decisions.

I'm Dr. Katie Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

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