The Curious Case Of An Innovation That Arrived So Late

Humans landed on the moon before they got the wheeled suitcase

There is nothing sophisticated about attaching wheels to suitcases. The technology is so basic and rudimentary to make us think somebody invented it hundreds of years ago.

It may shock you, humans mastered rocket science before they invented the wheeled bag. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, we were pulling and dragging heavy luggage in railway stations and airports.

Why did it take so long for the wheeled suitcase to arrive?

Innovation is not merely a linear progression from the crude to the sophisticated. Sometimes, we master complex technologies like rocket science before we adopt simple ideas like attaching wheels to suitcases. Innovation depends on two architectures — physical and socio-cultural — before it gains acceptability and traction in society.

Innovation has to satisfy a physical need before people embrace it. Till the 1970s, railway stations and airports were small. People could get dropped at vantage points so that there was little need to carry heavy luggage for long distances.

In the pre-wheeled bag era, men travelled more than women. Men wouldn't want to create a public scene struggling with their luggage. Carrying heavy baggage with ease had a touch of macho to it. Porters were plentiful and helped carry heavy suitcases.

What facilitated the introduction of the wheeled bag?

As author Matt Ridley said in his book “How Innovation Works: And Why it Flourishes in Freedom,”:

The lesson of the wheeled baggage is that you often cannot innovate before the world is ready. And that when the world is ready, the idea will be already out there, waiting to be employed.

Travel, especially by air, exploded in the 70s. The expansion of air travel caused the construction of bigger airports making it necessary for travellers to drag their heavy bags for longer distances than before. The number of women travellers also increased. Many businesswomen travelled frequently and had to manage bigger suitcases.

Who invented the wheeled bag?

Nothing attracts humans more than storytelling. We like simple questions and straightforward answers. That’s not the way innovation works. Attribution of single authorship to scientific inventions and innovations misses the layered and nuanced stories where multiple inventors conceived of the same idea. One among them was lucky enough to pursue the idea to its logical end as they were at the right time, the right place, and had the right resources to execute the innovation.

For example, Charles Darwin is a leading star in the scientific pantheon for his theory of the origin of species by natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace, an English biologist, published an article-size paper on the same theory before Darwin published his Origin of Species. Luck and circumstances favoured Darwin more than Wallace.

According to author Matt Ridley:

Simultaneous invention is more the rule than the exception. Many ideas for technology just seem to be ripe, and ready to fall from the tree. The most astonishing case is the electric light bulb, the invention of which was independently achieved by twenty-one people.

Coming to the wheeled bag, the winner is Bernard Sadow, who worked as an executive in a Massachusetts luggage company. In 1970, on his way back from a holiday, Sadow was waiting in a customs queue at an American airport. He had to drag two heavy pieces of luggage along while the queue inched forward. He noticed an airport employee pulling a heavy machine atop a wheeled trolley.

He had the typical eureka moment. “You know, that’s what we need for luggage”, Sadow told his wife.

Back home, Sadow ripped off four casters from an old trunk and attached them to a suitcase. He pulled the suitcase on wheels with a sling.

Sadow got a patent for his invention in 1972. The patent stated that “Whereas formerly, luggage would be handled by porters and be loaded or unloaded at points convenient to the street, the large terminals of today, particularly air terminals, have increased the difficulty of baggage-handling.” It added that “Baggage -handling has become the biggest single difficulty encountered by an air passenger.”

Very often inventors face resistance from society’s entrenched habits before they can market their new products. Sadow had to run from one retailer to another to persuade them to accept his prototype. Finally, the department store Macy’s accepted his invention and sold it as “the luggage that glides”.

Sadow’s invention lasted for about a decade before Robert Plath’s Rollaboard with telescoping handle and two wheels replaced it in 1987 as the traveller’s most preferred bag.

The wheeled bag disrupted the livelihoods of Indian railway porters

The wheeled bag did not disrupt the American market as luggage makers easily adopted the alternative model. Attaching wheels to existing suitcases did not involve major changes in the manufacturing process.

However, the wheeled bag disrupted the livelihood of thousands of porters working in India’s railway stations. The Indian Railways carry about 25 million passengers every day and employ over a million employees. The station porters, though not regular employees, earned decent incomes carrying heavy suitcases before the wheeled bag arrived.

Mostly, passengers wheeling suitcases avoided engaging porters to save money. To make matters worse for the porters, major stations with large footfalls installed escalators and introduced battery-operated cars to help passengers move across the platforms. A low-end technology ended up reducing the daily income of porters.

We believe innovation does not create unemployment because it creates more jobs than it replaces. This is true in most of the cases. But there are exceptions like the experience of India’s railway porters because what is typical in developed countries may not always happen in labour- surplus economies like India. The total impact may not be high considering India’s vast population, but technological innovations, especially labour-saving, take away jobs in some parts of the world.

Is the wheeled bag an invention or an innovation?

We use the words, ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ interchangeably. Invention involves the conception of a novel idea, innovation translates the idea into an affordable product of everyday use that saves time, money or energy.

Many inventors cannot scale up and convert their ideas into useful products. It takes an innovator to wrap up the idea with practical applications that people benefited from.

Bernard Sadow is an innovator as the idea of a wheeled bag already existed. Nobody thought of converting the idea into making a product that transformed travel.

Summing up

All technological innovations appear inevitable in retrospect. Innovations need several enabling circumstances that set the stage for crossing barriers and for sailing smoothly across the conception to the product cycle.

It may appear a surprise that the wheeled suitcase did not appear in the fifties or the sixties. It appeared on the horizon only when the society’s physical and socio-cultural architectures provided a fertile ground to satisfy unmet demand for easily transportable heavy travel bags.

Thanks for reading!