Serendipity Stories bring the practice of serendipity to life in real-world examples.
The rolling suitcase, like many transformative inventions, emerged from an everyday moment of frustration.
It was the 1970’s and Bernard D. Sadow was on his way back from a family vacation, dragging two heavy suitcases through an airport. While waiting in line at customs, he noticed a worker effortlessly rolling a heavy machine on a wheeled skid.
This chance observation turned out to be a moment of connection. When he returned to work at the luggage company where he was employed, he mounted furniture casters on a heavy travel suitcase. Putting a strap on the front, he began pulling it around. The rolling suitcase was born.
Fifteen years later, Northwest Airlines pilot Robert Plath had his own ‘aha’ connection moment born from his own daily experience. Watching flight crews struggle with their bags day after day, he tinkered in his garage to create something better. His innovation - the Rollaboard® - improved on Sadow's design by using just two wheels and adding a long extendable handle, allowing the suitcase to roll upright rather than being dragged flat.
These solutions seemed obvious in hindsight yet, remarkably, they weren't discovered earlier. For centuries, wheels had been used to move heavy objects, and people had been traveling with luggage, but it took Sadow's frustrated airport experience and his ability to connect the dots between the wheeled skid and his suitcase problem to bridge this gap.
The story reminds us how innovation often comes not from complex technological breakthroughs, but from someone noticing a simple solution hiding in plain sight. Both Sadow and Plath's inventions arose from personally experiencing a problem, seeing an adjacent solution in their environment, and having the insight to connect the two.