Excess baggage
An American luggage executive unscrewed four castors from a wardrobe and fixed them to a suitcase. Then he put a strap on his contraption and trotted it gleefully around his house.
This was how Bernard Sadow invented the world’s first rolling suitcase, which he patented in 1972, roughly 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel or, put another way, three years after Nasa managed to put men on the moon. So why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases?
Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Shiller discusses the matter in two different books, Narrative Economics and The New Financial Order. He sees it as an archetypal example of how innovation can be a slow-footed thing: how the “blindingly obvious” can stare us expectantly in the face for an eternity.
