Mother of Invention

How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men

Katrine Marçal

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008430818
• eBook ISBN: 9780008430795
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Notes

Chapter 1

… someone paid to sit at his desk, day in day out, and think about the business of suitcases: This description of how Bernard Sadow got his idea is based on Joe Sharkey, ‘Reinventing the Suitcase by Adding the Wheel’, New York Times, 4 October 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/business/05road.html.

The details of the 2010 interview that Joe Sharkey conducted with Bernard Sadow were confirmed in an interview with the author on 11 August 2020. A similar description of what happened can also be found in Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works, 4th Estate Books, London, 2020. That, too, is based on Sharkey’s 2010 interview. When Robert Shiller discussed the invention in Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2003, he asked his then research assistant to conduct a telephone interview with Sadow. No transcript of the interview appears to still exist, but the account of events given in The New Financial Order is essentially the same as the one in Sharkey’s 2010 New York Times article, which is therefore deemed trustworthy. In the interview with the author held on 11 August 2020, Sharkey stated that Sadow had objected to some of the content in Sharkey’s 2010 New York Times article after publication. What these objections were Sharkey couldn’t remember exactly, but they did not relate to how Sadow was cited or how the circumstances of his invention were described. As Sharkey recalled, they related to Robert Plath’s invention also being mentioned.

The 30-odd hijackings that took place in the USA each year: Libby Nelson ‘The US Once Had More than 130 Hijackings in 4 Years. Here’s Why They Finally Stopped’, Vox, 29 March 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11326472/hijacking-airplanes-egyptair.

While queuing at customs, Sadow noticed a man who presumably worked at the airport: There is some uncertainty as to where exactly Bernard Sadow was when he had his idea. The detail that he was on his way through customs at the airport when the idea struck him comes from the interview Joe Sharkey did with him for the New York Times in 2010. In an interview with the author on 11 August 2020, Sharkey stated that the interview transcript no longer existed as he had left the New York Times a long time ago, but, as he recalls, that was what Bernard Sadow had told him.

This was the future: There are other versions of how Bernard Sadow constructed – or even commissioned – his wheeled suitcase. I have chosen this one, as it is Joe Sharkey’s version, which is based on a direct interview with Sadow from 2010. Many other versions of the story are not based on direct conversations with the inventor, and I therefore consider them less trustworthy.

For the human body, however, the circle is not natural: This point is made by Steven Vogel in Why the Wheel is Round: Muscles, Technology and How We Make Things Move, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016, p. 1.

… long before the Mesopotamians started throwing pots on circular discs: See for example Richard W Bulliet, The Wheel, Columbia University Press, New York, 2016, pp. 50–59 for a summary of these theories.

It was unearthed in Slovenia, about 20 kilometres south of Ljubljana: Aleksander Gasser, ‘World’s Oldest Wheel Found in Slovenia’, Government Communication Office of the Republic of Slovenia, March 2003. Archived version available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160826021129/http://www.ukom.gov.si/en/media_room/background_information/culture/worlds_oldest_wheel_found_in_slovenia/.

In his application, he wrote: ‘The luggage actually glides … any person, regardless of size, strength or age, can easily pull the luggage along without effort or strain.’ Quoted from patent US3653474A, United States Patent Office.

… and is therefore considered the father of the wheeled suitcase: There are examples of suitcases with wheels earlier than Bernard Sadow’s, as we will also see later in this chapter. It appears to be a general phenomenon that many people can have a similar idea at around the same time independently of one another. This is the case with many inventions. Who then counts as ‘the inventor’ can sometimes come down to luck. In the literature, however, there is some form of consensus that Bernard Sadow should be considered the inventor of the wheeled suitcase. American patents for wheeled suitcases that came before Bernard Sadow’s are, for example, Arthur Browning (1969), Grace and Malcolm McIntyre (1949), Clarence Norlin (1947), Barnett Book (1945) and Saviour Mastrontomio (1925).

Robert Shiller, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics: The economics prize is not a ‘real’ Nobel Prize in the sense that it wasn’t in Alfred Nobel’s will. Economics as we know it today didn’t exist back then. The correct name for the prize is therefore ‘The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’.

Sadow presented his product to buyers from almost all of the USA’s major department stores, and initially all of them rejected it: Robert Shiller, 2003, The New Financial Order, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2003, p. 101.

It wasn’t that they thought the idea of a suitcase on wheels was a bad one. They just didn’t think anyone would want to buy the product: From an interview that Shiller’s research assistant conducted when working on the book The New Financial Order.

‘Everybody I took it to threw me out,’ [Sadow] would later recount. ‘They thought I was crazy.’ ‘Everybody I took it to, threw me out – from Sterns, Macy’s, A & S, all the major department stores,’ Sadow said. ‘They thought I was crazy, pulling a piece of luggage.’

He towed it around in his office, then called in the buyer who had originally rejected it and gave him the order to buy it: Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, John Murray Press, London, 2019, pp. 131–2.

Then we could roll! Practical, no? John Allan May, ‘Come What May: A Wheel of an Idea’, Christian Science Monitor, 4 October 1951, p. 13.

In his book Narrative Economics [Shiller] suggests that our resistance to rolling suitcases can be explained by group pressure, which often plays a role in the scepticism surrounding newfangled ideas: See Robert Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford, 2019, pp. 37–8.

Having lugged heavy suitcases through airports and railway stations for years, he was astonished by his own unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. He went on to investigate this phenomenon in his book Antifragile: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Penguin Books, London, 2012, pp. 187–92.

But in medicine, for example, it isn’t at all uncommon for decades to pass between a discovery being made and the resulting product reaching the market: Seventeen years on average. Taleb, however, mentions more extreme examples.

… cried a 24-year-old Steve Jobs after seeing a pointer move across a computer screen for the first time: See, for example, Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Creation Myth’, The New Yorker, 9 May 2011.

In other words, Xerox had invented … the mouse: The computer mouse, an idea that Xerox had in turn got from Douglas Engelbart, an American engineer and inventor.

The emperor set load limits for wheeled carriages, and they weren’t generous: That the wheel didn’t immediately change the world is a point made in detail by Richard W Bulliet in The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions, Columbia University Press, New York, 2016, pp. 20–24.

Still, it’s hard to imagine any such economic explanation as to why the wheel only made it onto our suitcases in 1972: This point is put forward by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile and is discussed in depth by Richard W Bulliet in The Camel and the Wheel, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990.

Passengers increasingly carried their own luggage, or used luggage trolleys: This is the basis for the invention that Bernard Sadow highlights in his patent application from 1972. His focus is on flights, which also likely reflects the fact that he is American. European discussions surrounding bags and the problems of carrying them seem to have revolved more around the railway.

You would be sweating like a pig before you even got to customs in Madrid: ‘Looking at Luggage’, Tatler, 25 January 1961, pp. 34–5.

The new wheel-strap device had its first sighting at a railway station in Coventry in 1948: ‘Portable Porter Has Arrived’, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 24 June 1948.

The company that had patented the product also just happened to hail from Coventry: In the 1940s there was a product with the same name, Portable Porter, in the USA, made by a different company: MacArthur Products Inc., Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, USA.

But this was a niche, inexpensive product for English women, and it didn’t catch on: ‘The Look of Luggage’, The Times, 17 May 1956, p. 15.

His passenger, however, was unconvinced, asking: ‘If I boarded a bus wearing roller-skates, would I be charged as a passenger or a pram?’ Trinity Mirror, 19 November 1967.

[Sylvan Goldman] who owned an American grocery-store chain in the 1930s: Terry P Wilson, The Cart that Changed the World, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1978.

‘You mean with my big strong arms I can’t carry a darn little basket like that?’ Description by Sylvan Goldman.

Back in the twelfth century, poet Chrétien de Troyes told the story of Lancelot: Richard Bulliet, The Wheel, pp. 131–2.

This is the crux of Lancelot’s dilemma, and what makes the dwarf’s offer so diabolical: A cart of the type that the dwarf offers Lancelot to ride in was also the cart that murderers and thieves would be put in. All to truly demean them.

… wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Inventions
• Technology
• Femininity
• Body
• Future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher