All the pieces were there. Suitcases became popular in the late 1800s. The wheel was invented 5,400 years earlier. We even called suitcases luggage—as in lugging it around. What could be more unpleasant?
Still, for whatever reason, it sure took a long time for the human race to put wheels on a suitcase.
It's right there in the What Took Us So Long Hall of Shame with finally putting ketchup in a squeezable bottle.
To put it all in perspective, it took 125 years for wheels on a suitcase, 107 years for the Heinz Company to change their glass bottles to squeezable plastic bottles in 1983, and a relatively comparable 193 years for the United States to safely land humans on the moon.
Now, two of those three make sense. It wasn't until the 1950s when high-density polyethylene plastic was invented. And Stanley Kubrick didn't have the visual technology to create the "moon landing" in 1969 until after he made 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. But yet for over a century and a quarter, suitcase + wheels = nothing.
It wasn’t until the 1930s that the combination of suitcases and wheels was even considered—and even then it was with the hassle of a complicated harness armature contraption that had to be strapped to a suitcase so it could be wheeled around.
In the four decades that followed no one looked at suitcases on carts and thought: Hey what if I just take those wheels on the cart and attached them to the suitcase?
Finally, in 1970—when many of you reading this were alive—Bernard D. Sadow invented "Rolling Luggage." But even then he got it wrong. Sadow’s invention was four tiny wheels on the bottom corners of the suitcase, pulled around by a loose strap. I remember these things. The suitcase would sweep out on an out-of-control arc, 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.
Oh well, back to the drawing board.
It took another seventeen years of brainpower to make four consequential revisions to Sadow's attempt.
In 1987, a mere 34 years ago, Northwest Airlines pilot and part-time tinkerer Robert Plath flipped the suitcase upright, lost two wheels, made the remaining two wheels larger, and 86ed the leash replacing it with a telescoping handle so the suitcase could be rolled upright. He called it the “Rollaboard" and it was the wheeled suitcase design that we still use to this day.
Plath quit his day job and formed his own luggage company, Travelpro. He sold his business in 1999 and is now semi-retired. Sadow passed away in 2011. I wonder if his coffin had little wheels attached so it could be pulled to his gravesite. If not, I think I may have just invented the next big thing.
It boggles my mind that it took the human race as long it did to take the "lug" out of luggage. We literally put a man on the moon but we couldn’t put wheels on a suitcase.