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Comment by plastic3169 | Hacker News Reader

My favorite is that luggage with wheels was invented in 1972. The tech was there already. We just waited for somebody to invent it.

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Mine is how we have evidence of wheels being used on children's toys in some south american cultures but not for transportation - they fully discovered everything to create wheeled transportation, but it's suspected that living on hilly terrain made it much less advantageous and it was not adopted.

Edit0: A good read : https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-...

Edit1: from the source: "Rather, and as Hernandez said (1950: 40), the ancient inhabitants of Mesoamerica did not apply the concept of revolving movement to transportation “simply because they did not want to, because of atavistic concepts worthy of being taken into account.” In a perceptive way, Hernández emphasized the indigenous ethos towards sacrifice and the offering of physical effort to the deities. Today, in Western thought, the constant technological innovation that leads to consumerism is valued, but in other cultures - ancient and modern - greater value is given to conservatism."

i guess the real invention for wheeled transportation is not wheels, but (flat) roads

Plus draft animals capable of pulling large wagons.

Oxen and horses were unavailable for pre-Columbian civilizations in the new world, and poor llamas cannot cut it.

Wheels are hugely beneficial for human-powered transportation too though, well, such as the luggage example up-thread.

It's thought the moyai on Easter Island were moved into place rolled on logs, they didn't have oxen or horses either, but rolling on logs or if they'd built a wheeled trailer make it much easier for a group of humans to move them without damage than just be dragging or rocking.

To be clear south american civilisations had the wheel and used it for throwing pottery, for drills and many other uses different than transportation - it is also suspected that they used the same log method to move large objects. Just not a wheel-axle-bearing "vehicle"

Coiling was actually the main method and there's not any evidence they used potters wheels until after European contact and even then it didn't take off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramics_of_Indigenous_peoples...

I don't think any American civilizations had the potter's wheel.

On cleared and mostly flat ground yes. But if you are going up any sorts of inclines human power doesn't really cut it over any real distances without adding mechanical assistance that slows everything way down. And on rough terrain its a wash even before you consider the difficulties in making wooden wheels that can survive off-road abuse for any length of time.

Over hilly terrain in jungle-y environments I bet that goes down a fair amount though, you have to make the simultaneous leap of wheeled carts plus road paving or maintenance to make the carts not a slog probably.

On the contrary, you'll apreciate wheels more if you are your own source of motive power.

It is certainly somewhat interesting that, unlike the Chinese, the Amerindians never used a wheelbarrow.

https://www.wheelbarrows.co.uk/evolution-of-the-wheelbarrow/

> Oxen and horses were unavailable for pre-Columbian civilizations in the new world

Eventually. Horses only became extinct in the New World around 10,000 years ago — somewhere between 15,000 and 6,000 years after humans arrived.

Yes, the horse is actually an American species that expanded into the Old World.

The pre-Columbian civilizations (and by that I mean the highly organized socially stratified societies that we are aware of) only emerged several millennia after the paleo-Indians hunted horses to extinction, though.

They had giant sloths?

Well except they died out ~ 9,000+ years before the initial invention of the wheel.

You can’t scale up a wheel on a children’s toy and expect it to work on a loaded cart. It would just break. Cartwheels that will go the distance require fairly skilled carpentry.

Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans did have fairly skilled carpentry, though. They just didn't have cart wheels.

Perhaps it was precisely because they were not so skilled?

Carpentry is a pretty big field, so it is probably not right to say they were or weren’t skilled.

They didn’t have the specific skill of making cart wheels.

Another potential reason it was never scaled up to carts is they didn't have access to a great draft animal candidate. Without that early carts are a lot less useful. The largest options were llamas or alpacas which are still fairly small and weak as draft animals go. The nearest option would have been buffalo in North America but they don't have great base temperaments for domesticating and they're not geographically relevant to South America even if they were.

Actually, this makes me think the opposite. This is a great example actually.

Polyurethane wheels weren't introduced to skateboarding until 1971. It took off in popularity due to this because the previous wheels were made of clay and were basically terrible.

I don't know the history of luggage wheels, but it sounds like it was waiting for the invention of the polyurethane wheel.

People credit Dick Fosbury for inventing the modern high jump approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop but it was the switch from jumping onto foam pads rather than into a pile of sawdust and sand that made it possible.

how come they didn't raise the platform and put "pillows" on it? :o

This. What held up wheeled luggage was the difficulty of having small, reliable wheels that could bear a lot of weight. You could have big wheels, but that would be impractical here, though not for chariots, wheelbarrows, pushcarts, or rickshaws ... which did exist in antiquity.

I remember metal skates (steel perhaps) in the early seventies.

I guess this kind of invention also depends on a few things outside what is technically possible:

Do you have enough flat surfaces where the wheels will work in the places people travel.

How cheap and dependable can you build it without adding too much weight to the luggage.

Are there enough people traveling and carrying their own luggage for them to purchase this.

More importantly, prior to airline deregulation in the 1970s only the wealthy and business travelers were flying and someone else carried their bags for them. It is the middle class traveler who lugs their own bags.

A bag on wheels is also practical in rail or boat travel, which wasn't exactly an abode of the rich.

Ever lugged a huge wheel-less piece of luggage around a big railway station? I have. It is hell.

I think the difference is that flight opened up quick trips where you might want a bag with just enough clothing for a few days. I also think the 1970s also hits a point where peoples' clothing had become a good bit simpler. Wheeled bags shine in airports for carry on bags.

"I think the difference is that flight opened up quick trips where you might want a bag with just enough clothing for a few days."

Traveling salespeople etc. would often go on relatively short trips, even in the steam engine era. We underestimate mobility of pre-WWII people by a lot...

The point about simpler clothing is really interesting. I can imagine that this could be the crucial difference.

I think there are numerous small changes that all come together at the same time. It wouldn't have taken much to build wheels into steamer trunks.

Why wouldn’t quick trips work on surface transport? Sure, it takes a long time to go far - surely nearly nobody ever went from London to China and came back a week later until it was practical to do so on planes. But for short distances it still would have been practical. I’m guessing there were people going from London to Manchester for a few days well before the 1970s.

The railway companies in Britain built their own hotels. The first was in 1839:

> The first railway hotels in London were built at Euston. Two hotels designed by Hardwick opened in 1839 on either side of the Arch; the Victoria on the west had basic facilities while the Euston on the east was designed for first-class passengers

And in Manchester:

> The Grand Junction Railway, Britain's first trunk line, was completed between Curzon Street railway station in Birmingham and Warrington Bank Quay railway station, Warrington, on 4 July 1837. Through trains began to convey passengers from the station to Birmingham, and a separate booking office and waiting room were provided. From 17 September 1838 there were through carriages to London Euston by some trains after completion of the London and Birmingham Railway in that year. This increase in long-distance services resulted in one of the first private railway hotels opening in Liverpool Road.

Here it is: https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/tours/tour1/area1pa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_railway_station#Old_sta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Liverpool_Road_rail...

I think you also need travel to be available for a class of people who are both expected to change clothes every day and did not have porters carrying their luggage.

Air travel is basically immune to terrestrial obstacles. You can fly over almost anything, even though you do have to worry about the weather.

Not true about flying. My family was definitely middle class, and we made several trips on jet airplanes, along with many other non-upper class people, in the mid-60s.

Although perhaps I misunderstand your point--if your point is about someone else carrying the bags, maybe. But if that's the case, then why restrict it to flying, as opposed to travel by train or car?

My favourite is that humanity had fire, baskets, ropes and silk by 3500 BCE, but it took thousands of years before anyone combined them into a hot air balloon.

We could have been flying in the neolithic period.

did people had that much usable silk in one place back then?

Did it wait for someone to invent it, or for it to make economical sense to put this tech in that particular application?

You can’t little wheely luggage until it’s little wheely luggage time?

Nor if you have a class of low paid (and before that unpaid) people who carried luggage for travelers. There was a lot of social change in the US after the 1960's, and travel only became democratized recently.

You have this in India today, yet wheeled luggage has completely displaced unwheeled in any airport

Presumably that's because most of the people flying in or out are traveling from/to other countries, and it makes no sense for them to own one set of luggage for India, and another for the rest of the planet, especially if the latter is compatible with the former anyway.

Not on unpaved, bumpy roads.

I had a wheeled suitcase in probably the late 70s--which was an unstable wheeled traditional suitcase. (i.e. narrow configuration with a high center of gravity.)

Not sure why it took a while for manufacturers to reimagine to a more stable orientation.

There was some parallel technical innovation--such as the wheels and bearings for rollerblades--that was going on during the 80s.

Perhaps the need was less pressing when airports were smaller and fewer people traveled.

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