FT.com / Columnists / Michael Skapinker - The luggage revolution ...

Wheels have been around since at least 3500 BC, when a Sumerian pictograph depicted some on a sledge. So why, I wondered as I watched the luggage tumble around the airport conveyor belt, did it take humankind nearly 5,500 years to put wheels on suitcases – and why did it take me even longer?

It was only in the late 1980s that Robert Plath, a Northwest Airlines pilot who was tired of lugging his bag around, fixed wheels and a pull-up handle to a suitcase and turned it upright. Manufacturers were sceptical, but Mr Plath sold some wheeled bags to other airline crew members and then set up a luggage company called Travelpro.

Within a few years he had transformed the suitcase business. In 1994, USA Today reported: “The luggage industry has gone wheelie crazy. If it didn’t roll, it wasn’t at this year’s Luggage and Leather Goods Manufacturers show.”

I was not at the Luggage and Leather Goods Manufacturers show, but my excuse for allowing the wheeled suitcase revolution to pass me by is pretty thin. It is not as if I were shut up in my study at the time writing a history of Moorish architecture. I was the Financial Times aviation correspondent. Embarrassing, I know.

It was not that I did not notice the wheeled suitcases. You could barely avoid them. If they weren’t running over your toes, they were blocking the airport escalators. It was just that I didn’t feel the need to change the luggage I had.

Determined to spend as little time as possible hanging around airport arrival halls, I did all my FT travel with a slim suit bag slung over my shoulder. What did I care that other people’s carry-on wheelie bags took up almost all the overhead locker space on every flight? I could slip my bag in between them.

When we landed, I was off the aircraft and through the “nothing to declare” exit with my suit bag before the wheeled luggage owners had even extended their handles.

I was not entirely alone. No less an authority than my FT Weekend colleague and style arbiter Tyler Brûlé wrote: “I think wheels are acceptable for some but have decided they’re just not for me.”

Mr Brûlé said he got by with “a stubby, cotton twill duffel bag by Porter”, although when he was looking for something to hold his books, magazines, laptops and cables, he opted for “a slightly squarish black shoulder bag in a herringbone weave”. Those were my preferences exactly, or they would have been if I had known what a herringbone weave was.

On family holidays, wheels were never necessary either, as the old suitcases from the loft had to be carried only from the car boot into a country cottage, where they would stay until it was time to go home.

Then this summer, for the first time in many years, we went on a holiday involving movement from city to city and ticket office to train platform and I realised how horribly unsuitable my luggage was. My suitcase does have wheels, but not the sort that allow you to tip it upright. You do not pull the case along with a lead, as if it were a dog (even I am not that backward). Instead it has a short loop on the top corner, so that you wheel it along in the same position as if you were carrying it by its handle.

This allowed me to see the true genius of Mr Plath’s creation. It is not just the wheels that make his bags easy to move. It is turning the suitcase into the vertical position and equipping it with a long, broad handle that allows an even distribution of the weight. A small handle in the front, as I had, means the entire load is concentrated in your hand.

It was in Venice, with its narrow lanes and endless bridges, where I felt it most, as everyone else glided by with their properly wheeled luggage.

William Shakespeare’s question “What news on the Rialto?” could have been easily answered by my fellow travellers: “I’ve just seen Mr Stupid Suitcase 2008.”

There have been attempts from time to time to mount a campaign for the return of real luggage. Tyler Brûlé has not been the wheeled suitcase’s only enemy.

In 2000, The Wall Street Journal wrote: “The nation’s No 1 carry-on, the wheelie, is starting to roll out of style with many travellers, who find it difficult to manoeuvre, too big to fit easily in overhead bins, and so ubiquitous it’s impossible to identify at baggage claims ... As a result, the wheelie has become a fashion faux pas.”

Tell that to this summer’s travelling hordes. Everyone except me had a proper wheeled suitcase. Even the backpacks had wheels on them. The reason was simple. Wheeled suitcases may look ungainly but they do not cripple you. Even that suit bag, as I now recall, digs hard into the shoulder.

So why did I not invest in a wheeled bag? Because I was half asleep. Why did it take millennia for the world to wake up to the idea of wheels on luggage? That is a far bigger mystery.