Back to the future | 28 February 2019

The Romans never invented the stirrup. It took 50 years after the invention of canned food for someone to invent the can opener. And we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases.

This seems silly. But it is worth understanding each invention in context: often, a concatenation of other events has to occur before an invention can become widely adopted.

The stirrup was of no use until the invention of the saddle-tree, which more evenly spread the rider’s weight across the horse’s back. The can opener had to wait for thinner cans: early tins were too hefty to submit to anything less than a chisel. In the case of wheeled luggage, the barrier may have been social acceptance. Luckily Robert Plath, who patented the two-wheeled Rollaboard in 1991, was a Boeing 747 pilot with Northwest Airlines, who began selling his invention to other pilots and crew. When passengers began asking to buy them, he started the Travelpro company.

Was Plath lucky in selling to flight professionals first? After all, had its earliest users not been dashing pilots but elderly tourists, the wheeled case might have become stigmatised as something only for oldies – like those tartan shopping wheelers in the 1970s.

This path-dependence explains why, when asked my predictions of which technology will be important in ten years’ time, I repeatedly cite video-conferencing. Since the technology has been around for decades, this makes me look a bit daft — you’re supposed to mention driverless cars or blockchain. Nevertheless, video-conferencing still has the potential to change the worlds of work, travel, land use and time use more than any driverless car. It just requires a few stars to fall into alignment first:

1) The realisation that email is utter crap.