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> Once discovered, applying it to a countertop application seems inevitable I guess hindsight is funny like that, most inventions/technology seem obvious to us

• pm215 1y ago
  It took a little while, but the window isn't quite as wide as it might at first seem. Before solid smooth paved and floored surfaces are ubiquitous, wheels on luggage are of only limited use, and if you are carrying your own luggage you want something that's easy to carry on your back. In a time period where most people rich enough to be doing travelling with luggage have servants to carry it, making the luggage easier to move around isn't very high priority. When cost of labour is low and porters in railway stations and hotels are ubiquitous, wheeled luggage seems less necessary. And at the other end of the window, Wikipedia reports ad-hoc attempts to do wheels on luggage in the 1920s, and actual patents or products (either for a wheeled suitcase or a "put wheels on your existing suitcase" add-on) by the 1940s. I think I'd be happy putting this in the "inevitable" category -- the idea floats around and maybe it takes a few decades for the market to be wide enough and somebody to have a good implementation and marketing to make it take off as a consumer product, but if the specific people who did that in our timeline hadn't managed to, somebody else would have.
• scotty79 1y ago
  For wheels on luggage to make sense we had to build enough flat, hard surfaces on the way. When we did, it was inevitable.