Wheeled luggage is cited as an example of an obvious innovation being overlooked. The principle was understood, but intentionally ignored, just as we will focus new technologies in limited areas today, leaving additional “obvious” applications to the future.
When I write about technology, I usually reference software, since that’s my field of expertise. But lessons can be learned from all types of technology. Remembering that famous quote, “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes” (commonly attributed with no evidence to Mark Twain but more likely to Theodor Reik), given how AI is upending many industries it can be helpful to understand broader drivers of innovation and why certain inventions happen when they do, but not sooner.
A story I sometimes hear “experts” use is the following. Luggage has been around for hundreds of years; the wheel has been around for thousands; but it wasn't until the 1970s that someone thought to put wheels on luggage.
This sounds really perplexing. How was this obvious technological combination completely ignored for years? It also suggests that technological breakthroughs come from brilliant inventors leaping us forward and that so many non-brilliant people can miss the obvious. These ideas are echoed by talking heads like Nassim Taleb who think it was simply lack of perception that no one realized this innovation before, claiming it wasn’t until 30 years that we put a man on the moon that people thought about putting wheels on a suitcase. He’s wrong on two fronts First, we put a man on the moon in 1969, roughly the same time wheels were added to the suitcase (in fact, wheels came first, as we’ll see below), and second that it was not for lack of inventiveness but lack of desire.
Taleb goes on to argue,
The story of the wheel itself is even more humbling than that of the suitcase: we keep being reminded that the Mesoamericans . . . had wheels. But the wheels were on small toys for children. Mayans and Zapotecs did not make the leap to the application. They used vast quantities of human labor, corn maize, and lactic acid to move gigantic slabs of stone in the flat spaces ideal for pushcarts and chariots where they built their pyramids. They even rolled them on logs of wood. Meanwhile, their small children were rolling their toys on the stucco floors.
But like many Eurocentric elitists, he applies today’s standards and environment in judging others and finds them to be inferior for not making the choices we make today. In fact, they made the right choice, clear to anyone who actually does the research into those societies instead of summarily judging them. The decision to delay adding wheels to luggage (as well as other the Mesoamerican transportation choices) was not due to lack of intelligence or ethnic superiority, but external factors. It isn’t that wheels were kept off of luggage because no one had the insight to put them there, but rather that socioeconomic forces didn’t incentivize anyone to do so. Exploring what caused this can help us learn about other factors that will drive current and future innovations.
It’s true that the wheel itself has been around since about 3500 BC, originally seen as a potter’s wheel. Within a few hundred years humans hooked it up to ox carts and other devices to get efficiency gains. Much later, the human powered wheel barrow, tellingly called a “wooden ox,” was first recorded in the third century in China.
Luggage has been around for not just hundreds of years, but thousands. For most of human history very few people actually needed luggage. The vast majority of people living in villages rarely ventured more than a few miles from where they were born and usually did so for a brief trip wearing the clothes on their back and goods that they needed for trade. Luggage was unnecessary. Hunter-gatherers traveled far, but also traveled light, only what they could carry. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t see much pottery (although not none) in purely hunter-gatherer tribes, let alone trunks.
The only people who needed luggage were the aristocratic classes. Initially it was kings, who often traveled with a host full of servants who carried everything they needed (sometimes on wheeled carts, other times by hand). A few hundred years ago such extended-stay travel expanded to include wealthy people in general. But did they need wheeled luggage? The roads themselves were not paved or level in most of the world; have you ever tried rolling a suitcase over cobblestones, let alone muddy roads? More importantly, there was no benefit. The rich had servants who would pack the trunks and carry them to the carriage. At the boat, porters would convey the trunks onto the ship and deliver them to the room. The whole process was reversed at the destination. The owner of the trunk never once moved it.
Adding wheels increased cost and complexity and likely looked garish to their sensibilities; there was no upside. It wouldn’t help the owner of the luggage in the slightest. Sure, it would make things easier for the servants and porters, but their needs weren’t generally considered in a purchase, and certainly not in product design.
It wasn’t until mass transportation in the twentieth century that large numbers of people began to travel. Many of these new travelers didn’t have servants, and the number of porters at railway stations and ports began to decline as transportation became more mass market and lower in cost. For the first time in history many people were traveling regularly and carrying their own luggage. Consequently, the suitcase itself only dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, prior it was mostly steamer trunks and their predecessors.
The modern wheeled suitcase is generally considered to have been “invented” by Bernard Sadow in the 1960s with his patent for Rolling Luggage filed in 1970. Others claim Polish painter Alfred Krupa first invented it in the 1950s. The Guardian notes that there were advertisements as early as the 1940s in Britain for wheeled attachments which could be added to suitcases (source). Given the state of communication technology at the time it’s not surprising an invention in Britain pre-WWII or in Yugoslavia (part of the USSR) in the 1950s was unknown in the US. But who gets credit isn’t the point. The fact that the wheels and luggage existed for thousands of years but never together until it was independently invented (at least) two times (three if Krupa had no knowledge of the British invention of the 1940s), all within a few decades is telling.
Innovation requires a unique combination of factors. The technological feasibility of the innovation is obviously the most critical. But as wheeled luggage illustrates, even if something had been feasible for centuries, it still may not happen. It also requires circumstances under which the economic utility matters. We see with luggage there was no economic benefit; after all the servants and porters were paid the same whether they carried or wheeled the luggage. No doubt the economic viability of wheeled luggage received a tailwind noted by Mr. McGuire in The Graduate, “plastics.” This other technological improvement, plastic manufacturing, made it much faster and cheaper to mass produce affordable wheels and casters in a way that had been more difficult and costly prior. This lowered the cost at the same time demand was increasing.
But there can also be societal factors, another Guardian article quotes Sadow as saying, "[men carrying luggage] was a very macho thing," leading to initial resistance to rolling luggage (source). Additionally, in the UK, early wheeled suitcases sometimes required an extra ticket (source), as in one example where a bus driver argued to a female rider that anything having wheels made it equivalent to a pushchair (the woman, in a letter to her local newspaper, wondered if she had worn roller skates how would she be classified, as a person or carriage).
Rules, societal and legal, can accelerate or hinder inventions. As another example, in the 1990s Singapore wanted to create a culture of entrepreneurship, especially in technology. In studying the US, and specifically Silicon Valley, they realized many early entrepreneurs of the 1960s started home-businesses in garages. Singapore had prior limited businesses run from home but started to consider the rule change to promote entrepreneurship.
As we look at AI, drones, biotech, and other emerging technologies we have achieved the first requirement, that of technological feasibility. Large language models, for example, were not economically possible at this scale twenty years ago. (Analogously, the first human genome was sequenced at a cost of approximately $2.7B. Today it costs less than $1,000.)
With respect to applicability, its economic benefits point to the most likely use cases for new technologies. Today AI is being used to replace labor intensive practices like customer service, software development, healthcare, legal services, and creative work (not solely, but these are some of the biggest areas of applicability). All those fields have labor as the primary driver of cost (with the possible exception of healthcare in which labor cost may be rivaled in some specialized by tests or medicine). To a lesser extent we see it being used in K-12 education. AI will never replace teachers. Even if it’s far superior in educating students (I’m not making any claims either way), we could never leave students unsupervised in a room; consequently, the teachers, like the luggage carrying servants, are a fixed cost that cannot be easily replaced. This is not to say AI can’t improve education, but the economic returns for K-12 classroom education will be more limited than in a field like customer service where the labor can be reduced by 90% or more.
Likewise, AI may be used in the future to plan a city’s water, power, and sanitation systems. The main cost of those systems isn’t intellectual labor (design), but rather construction and maintenance, including parts and physical labor. Consequently, we’ll see less development for AI applied to those problems in the near term. This is not to say that AI won’t be applied or further developed for these fields, but rather that dollars, and ensuing improvements, both evolutionary and revolutionary, will flow towards fields with a higher economic yield. Years from now people may wonder why we didn’t use AI to manage our water systems earlier. It’s not that we didn’t think it was possible, but that we didn’t see enough returns to justify those efforts and instead applied the efforts to other problems with greater economic advantage.
As we look to new technologies, the key question is: what is the economic advantage of using them? The answer may not be the same in all cases. The wheel was very valuable to Eurasians with carts. It was less valuable to those same people with luggage, at least until the last hundred years, and it wasn’t valuable for more than use in toys to Mesoamericans until five hundred years ago. AI and other technologies have many uses, but it will be years, or even decades before they get fully applied to certain domains.
For those wondering why Mesoamericans didn’t apply wheels to their vehicles it wasn’t because they didn’t understand the principle of the wheel; again, the use of wheeled toys showed that they clearly understood the principle. They lacked engines. I’m not referring to what's under your hood, but the rather engines of the ancient world: large, domesticated animals. As Jared Diamond details in his fantastic book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, all large domestic animals in the American continents went extinct thousands of years ago, save for llamas and alpacas. “The wheels invented in Mesoamerica as parts of toys, never met the llamas domesticated in the Andes to generate wheeled transport in the new world.” (source: audiobook Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, chapter 18, 37 minutes) Horses and goats were brought by the Spanish in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Christopher Columbus first brought sheep in 1493 on his second voyage along with cattle. Having humans push wheeled carts, with the extra cart weight, over dirt paths and up hills was not more efficient than carrying items by hand.
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