Sometime in the 1990s, the sound of travel began to change. Previous changes were brought about by well-known inventions: when the hissing steam engine replaced the groaning cartwheel (or flapping sail); the jet pierced the buzzing propeller. But this new option is more democratic and more widespread. It can be heard everywhere – in every modest lane and in places where travelers often go: at train stations, in hotel lobbies and at airports. I hear it on the street near our house most of the day and night, but maybe especially early in the morning when people go on long journeys. “Doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo” – this is how children’s impressionists describe it. If we had heard this sound thirty years ago, we might have imagined an inline skater getting up at dawn to practice. Now that person can be anyone: a lawyer with wigs and legal papers, a family with enough luggage for a two-week stay in the Algarve. Light or heavy, large or small, another suitcase rumbles through a crack in the pavement on its way to the bus station or the subway.
What was life like before suitcases had wheels? Like many people of his generation, my dad wore our cardboard boxes on his left shoulder. He looked like a sailor and oared, as if a heavy chest could weigh no more than a parrot, although this meant that to enjoy the conversation, he always had to go to his right, before he could answer unexpected questions to his left, he had to turn. in that direction as slowly and unhurriedly as a blindfolded horse before a salute. I never mastered the technique of carrying on my shoulder and thought to myself that suitcases have handles and are meant to be used, although the real reason may be that I’m not strong enough. My father can walk long distances with his luggage. One Sunday morning when my brother returned home from RAF vacation, I remember walking with him two miles up the hills to the station, there was no other transport, but we could not find it. My dad slung his son’s duffel bag over his shoulders like it was nothing more than a backpack that the choir sang about in the Top 10 hit song “Happy Bum” at the time.
Others prefer other methods. Street photographs show that baby strollers may be piled high with holiday suitcases, and more portable strollers are in the mother’s arms. I suspect that my parents considered this behavior to be “common,” perhaps because this is how families sometimes move out of rent debt (“moonlight passes”). Of course, money is everything. If you have a small amount of luggage, you can call a taxi and porters or take a train to have your suitcases delivered to the front – a convenience that was a must for Clyde Coast holidaymakers in the 1960s and at least the 1970s. convenient for Oxford students. It looks like the work of Waugh or Wodehouse, but I remember a classmate’s socially ambitious mother saying to him, “Give the porter a shilling and let him put you and your boxes in North Berwick on the train.” the existence of the wheelless suitcase depends on a class of underpaid servants, the kind of red-shirted coolies you still find on Indian railway platforms skillfully stacking your luggage on top of their heads and running away with it, leaving the inexperienced traveler in fear that they might never get it again. see. .
But it seems that the wheel did not come about because of the cost of labor, but because of the large and flat distances of airports. More research is needed; there are still chests to be found in the history of everyday things to stick something like Henry Petroski into a pencil or Radcliffe Salaman into a potato, and like almost every invention, more than one person can legitimately claim credit for its merit. This. Wheeled devices that attach to suitcases have been around since the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 1970 that Bernard D. Sadow, vice president of a luggage manufacturing company in Massachusetts, had the idea. Returning home from a family vacation in the Caribbean, he struggled with two heavy suitcases and noticed at customs how airport officials moved heavy equipment on a wheeled pallet with little or no effort. According to Joe Sharkley’s account in The New York Times 40 years later, Sadow told his wife, “You know, this is the suitcase we need” before returning to work. Remove the rollers from the case and install them. They fit on a large suitcase with a drawstring at the front.
It works – well, why not? – Two years later, Sadow’s innovation was filed as US Patent #3,653,474: “Rolling Luggage”, claiming it was inspired by air travel. “Luggage used to be carried by porters and loaded and unloaded next to the street, and today’s large terminals … exacerbate the complexity of baggage handling, which has become perhaps the biggest difficulty aviation has ever faced. Passenger”. the popularity of wheeled suitcases was slow. Men especially resisted the convenience of a suitcase on wheels—“a very masculine thing,” Sadow recalls in The New York Times—when in fact his suitcase was a rather bulky, four-wheeled vehicle towed horizontally. Like Logie Bird’s TV, it was quickly supplanted by advanced technology, in this case the two-wheeled “Rollaboard” designed by Robert Plath in 1987. Robert Plath Plath, a Northwest Airlines pilot and DIY enthusiast, sold his early models to other flight crews. members. Roller skateboards have telescopic handles and can be rolled vertically with a slight tilt. The sight of flight attendants carrying them around the airport makes Plath’s invention a suitcase for professionals. More and more women are traveling alone. The fate of the wheelless suitcase is decided.
This month I drove a four-wheeled version of the old Rollaboard across Europe, a version I was late with because two wheels seemed sinful enough in the masculine world of old luggage. However: Two wheels are good, four is better. We got there by a roundabout and rather difficult route – 10 trains, two steamships, a subway, three hotels – although I understand that it is difficult for me to put me on the same level as Patrick Leigh Fermor or Norman. level, but it seems like an achievement that will never require a taxi for any of these pickups. Public transport is easily accessible. We move easily between trains, ships and hotels; on good flat roads the four wheeler seems to generate its own power and when the going gets tough (e.g. the Tour de France is called paved roads) it is easy to get back to the two wheeler and continue down the slope.
Maybe the cart is not a commodity in its purest form. This encouraged people to carry more than they needed—more than they could carry in an age without wheels—in suitcases the size of shipping boxes that clogged the aisles of trucks and buses. But apart from cheap flights, no other modern developments have made travel easier. We owe this to Sadow and Plath, as well as durable plastic wheels and feminism.
Post time: Aug-11-2023
