Travellers' Checks | Why did it take until the 1970s for wheeled luggage to appear when patent applications were being filed in the 1940s?

A man called Bernard Sadow is traditionally recognised by the media as being the inventor of the first wheeled suitcase – on sale from the early 1970s – while Robert Plath, then an airline pilot, is widely credited with creating the more practical, two-wheeled, retractable-handle case in the late 1980s. A dip into the archives at Google Patents, however, reveals that one Arthur J. Browning pre-dated both men with a brilliant, but apparently unfulfilled, patent filed in 1969.

Several decades of fascinating but seemingly fruitless invention can be found with a Google Patents search for “wheeled luggage”. One of the earliest of these patents was filed by the splendidly named Saviour Mastrontonio of New York, whose Luggage Carrier could permanently mobilise “a bag, satchel, suitcase or the like” by means of fixed wheels and an adjustable pulling handle.

Barnett H. Book filed his Wheeled Suitcase patent in 1945; and, in 1947, Clarence F. Norlin of Chicago filed a patent for retractable suitcase wheels (an idea trumpeted on Gizmodo and other websites with the unveiling of the yet-to-be-launched Heys Stealth line in 2015).

Why did so many wheeled luggage designs never catch on? A cynic might suggest the big luggage companies bought the patents to keep them off the market.

A note supplied with a patent application for a Wheeled Suitcase, filed by Grace and Malcolm McIntyre of Connecticut in 1949, offers another reason. One problem with previous models, they suggested, “was that they were awkward in movement and required considerable attention to steer them around and great annoyance, or even physical injury, when they encounter obstacles”.

Despite their improvements, the McIntyres’ design seems also to have vanished.