What came first? Wheeled luggage or a man on the moon?
Take a moment and look at this picture of travelers from the 1960s. Does anything strike you as odd?
Nearly everyone immediately notices that people are carrying their luggage. Wheeled luggage is so pervasive today, that the vision of the dystopian past where people required upper-body strength to travel seems really out of place. Clearly no one has a smart phone or Google Glass, but we notice the lack of wheeled luggage first.
With such a basic invention, surely we would have discovered wheels on luggage early. Right?
Putting Innovation in Perspective
The first patent for wheels on luggage in 1972 was a small evolution of the standard suitcase design. The luggage was shaped the same and would stand the same, but now with wheels and a strap to drag it. I remember this style from my childhood, and it was horribly unstable. But it was a true innovation, as the advertisement below shows. It changed lives for the better and was immediately recognized as an improvement.
The world saw many iterations on the wheeled luggage concept after 1972. The most notable milestone came in 1991 with the patent granted to Robert Plath, a Northwestern pilot who created the Rollaboard model with a telescoping handle and two wheels (instead of four). It was an instant hit.
Why Does All This Matter?
The 1960s had perhaps the highest level of concentrated innovation the world had ever seen. The Soviets and the Americans were spending countless amounts of money and re-shaping their societies to create newer and more impressive innovations to out-smart their rivals. The culmination of the Space Race was the landing of a man on the moon in late 1969.
Yet despite all the innovation that had occurred as a result of the Space Race, there was plenty innovation waiting… including wheeled luggage. Some of the most interesting innovations are perhaps the least technologically sophisticated.
But while we can all agree that innovation is never linear, it’s still shocking to think that we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on luggage.
The Social Trend in Action
I always ask entrepreneurs how humankind has survived 10,000+ years without their innovation. It’s sometimes a snarky question, but it digs deeper into the concept of the Social Trend. The secondary way of asking the question is, “What has changed in society recently that would lead to the acceptance or need for your innovation now… and only now?”
If we look again at the picture of people carrying luggage above, we notice another addition: the porter. Prior to the introduction of cheap travel, most people would have someone else to carry their luggage when it really mattered. The porter would bare all the inconvenience of carrying the luggage around, leaving the owners without a clear problem. The customer in this case would make a purchasing decision, but the user — the porter — has to do all the work.
The Social Trend in this scenario is the democratization of travel. Plane tickets started dropping in price and more people started visiting airports. Few people were accustomed to paying porters to carry their luggage. And people had to carry their own bags. Within years of this trend taking hold, innovation popped out.
A Tale of Two Innovators… and Millions Who Weren’t
The first wheeled luggage was invented by Bernard Sadow in 1970 because he had a harrowing experience in customs on his way back from Aruba. At the time, Mr. Sadow was an executive at a luggage company, the type of person who had the opportunity — — the duty? — to seek out new innovations and commercialize them. So the first introduction of wheels on luggage came from someone who went to work each day trying to make better luggage: a true insider.
The Rollaboard concept came along almost 20 years later and was invented by an airline pilot, someone who traveled frequently and required a much more convenient suitcase. The inventor in this case was a weekend tinkerer, but not a professional product developer. Still, after testing the concept with a number of friends and seeing the reactions of people in the airport, he knew he had a hit on his hand and created a company to commercialize his design.
The two types of innovation in this story include an industry insider looking to differentiation his product and a frequent user who knew there had to be a better way. But for such straightforward innovation, there should have been millions more people who identified a new solution earlier.
In 1992, there were about 150,000source airline pilots in the USA, but for each flight with two pilots there were probably a hundred other people in the plane that never thought to improve their luggage handling experience. I imagine there were countless engineers sitting in their airplane seats dreaming up designs for new luggage, but only two people ever took the leap to create huge innovations.
This just goes to show that innovation — and innovators — never come in the form and timeline that one would expect looking back. This begs the question, what simple innovations are still hanging out there to be easily picked? I’m sure in 30–40 years, no one would believe that we invented the smartphone before we invented the __________ (to be completed later).
