The name “suitcase” is in some ways a misnomer…suits need to be kept as wrinkle-free as possible so they’re usually hung up in garment bags. Even so, the word has passed into common usage. According to travelandleisure.com, while the popular imagination dates the beginning of the suitcase to the period of industrialisation in the 1800s, the story begins much earlier. The Knights Templar were the first to make use of wheeled luggage: The soldiers used the wheeled cases to transport armor and other items as early as 1153 during the Crusades. The golden age of luggage indeed arrived in the 19th Century, as travel became a part of the social capital of the wealthy and powerful. As industrialisation, steamer travel and ever-widening railroads stretched from the 19th into the 20th Century, more people than ever could travel. And trunk-makers rushed to outfit this new generation of travellers. What we now consider the “suitcase” was invented at the turn of the 20th Century, and it was intended as a lightweight, compact carrier designed to transport a dress-suit without wrinkling it. The dawn of air travel, however, ushered in a new era of innovation in luggage. As people worldwide took to the skies commercially in the late 1950s, travellers required suitcases that could fit in overhead compartments or be safely lugged around an airport. Synthetic materials became increasingly popular, as did plastic handles specifically, according to a report in the Smithsonian magazine in 2014. In the 20th Century Bernard Sadow, brought new inventions when he first patented wheeled suitcases in 1974. He came up with the idea while he was dragging heavy suitcases through customs following a family vacation to Aruba, according to The New York Times. Watching an airport employee push a cart of luggage on wheels, he crafted the idea of creating individual wheels for bags and added it to a line of the suitcases at the luggage company where he worked as a vice president. According to Fox News, luggage in the mid-to-late 19th Century was synonymous with some form of the travel trunk, a massive, cumbersome box that – even empty – could weigh more than 100 pounds. Porters and bellhops bore the brunt of the burden, as anyone wealthy enough to travel had hired hands to make the process easier. Up-and-coming trends, include ergonomically designed bags and backpacks, GPS-enabled technology and luggage that charges and protects tech gadgets.
