The most notable milestone came in with the patent granted to Robert Plath, a Northwestern pilot who created the Rollaboard model with a telescoping handle and two wheels instead of four. It was an instant hit. The s had perhaps the highest level of concentrated innovation the world had ever seen. The Soviets and the Americans were spending countless amounts of money and re-shaping their societies to create newer and more impressive innovations to out-smart their rivals.
The culmination of the Space Race was the landing of a man on the moon in late Yet despite all the innovation that had occurred as a result of the Space Race, there was plenty innovation waiting… including wheeled luggage. Some of the most interesting innovations are perhaps the least technologically sophisticated. If we look again at the picture of people carrying luggage above, we notice another addition: the porter. Prior to the introduction of cheap travel, most people would have someone else to carry their luggage when it really mattered.
The porter would bare all the inconvenience of carrying the luggage around, leaving the owners without a clear problem. The customer in this case would make a purchasing decision, but the user — the porter — has to do all the work. The Social Trend in this scenario is the democratization of travel.
Plane tickets started dropping in price and more people started visiting airports. Few people were accustomed to paying porters to carry their luggage. And people had to carry their own bags. Within years of this trend taking hold, innovation popped out. Sadow, vice president of a Massachusetts luggage company, who invented rolling luggage 40 years ago.
Though initially met with resistance by stubborn travelers, he told the New York Times in , his innovation caught on like wildfire after a little convincing. Reportedly sick of lugging his bags through the airport, Plath founded the luggage brand Travelpro to sell his invention, and first won the approval of the aviation industry, marketing his product to airline crews and pilots.
Just a few years later, the Rollaboard hit retail shelves across the U. It helped, too, that more and more women were traveling alone—a demographic who saw no shame in admitting their luggage was too heavy to carry without wheels.
Though Plath has since retired from the company, Travelpro is still seeking ways to make the travel experience easier. But is it really that surprising? The world is full of people who would rather die than let go of certain notions of masculinity. In this context, such ideas are certainly powerful enough to hold back technological innovation.
The rolling suitcase is far from the only example. This held back the size of the electric car market, especially in the US, and contributed to us building a world for petrol-driven cars. When electric starters for petrol-driven cars were developed they were also considered to be something for the ladies.
The assumption was that only women were demanding the type of safety measures that meant being able to start your car without having to crank it at risk of injury.
Assumptions about masculinity play a similar role today in relation to innovation around sustainability. For example, we often think that consumption of meat and preferences for large cars — instead of travel by public transport — are essential features of masculinity. This holds innovation back and prevents us from imagining new ways of living powered by new technologies. Perhaps in the future we will laugh at our current struggle to get many men to adopt a more environmentally friendly lifestyle, in the same way that we shake our heads at how unthinkable it was for a man to wheel his suitcase 40 years ago.
Ideas about gender also limit what we even count as technology. But technologies associated with women are not considered to be inventions in the same way that those associated with men are. Gender answers the riddle of why it took 5, years for us to put wheels on suitcases.
But many of the structural problems are still here. Among the very few women who do get funded, a very large majority are white. It was just a slightly different problem than the one they imagined it to be. This article was amended on 8 July Bernard Sadow invented the rolling suitcase in , not , which was the year the invention was patented. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.
Delivery charges may apply. Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention.
0コメント