They Didn't Call It Luggage for Nothing

I marvel at just how long it took the human race a long time for to figure out it could put wheels on a suitcase.

It was staring us in the face for like, 125 years. All the pieces were there: suitcases became popular in the late 1800s and the wheel was invented 5,400 years earlier. We even called suitcases luggage—lugging it around; lugging + suitcase + wheels = nothing.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that the combination was even considered with the engineering hassle of a complicated collapsible cart that was strapped to a suitcase so it could be wheeled around. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to attach those wheels right onto the suitcase and bypass that Rube Goldberg rolling harness armature contraption?

Apparently not.

For the four decades (that’s forty years to you and me) that followed no one looked at those suitcases on carts and thought: hey what if I just take those wheels on the cart and attached them to the suitcase?

It wasn’t until 1970—when many of you reading this were alive—that Bernard D. Sadow finally invented "Rolling Luggage." But wait, even then he got it wrong. Sadow’s invention was four tiny, half-dollar-sized wheels on the bottom corners of the suitcase, towed around by a loose strap. I remember these things. The suitcase would sweep on an arc out of control, wobble, and eventually fall over. It was completely ineffectual. So much so that people would put these wheeled suitcases back on carts to wheel them through airports.

Finally, in 1987, nearly 5,500 years after the wheel was invented and 100 years since the first suitcase, airline pilot Robert Plath invented the “Rollaboard" wheeled suitcase which we essentially use to this day—two large wheels on the upright suitcase, pulled by the extended handle. 1987. With the first moonshot in 1969, that means we literally put a man on the moon but we couldn’t put wheels on a suitcase.