When Vuitton flattened the trunk, he made longer travel viable. When Sadow added wheels, he made solo travel comfortable. When Plath stood it upright, he made it routine. Each shift looked small. Each one redrew who could move through the world without help.
Most of us own a suitcase without thinking about it. We pull it down from a closet shelf, fill it, wheel it to a curb. It tilts when overpacked. It clatters on cobblestones. It waits, patient, by the door.
It's an object so ordinary that we forget how recent it is — and how much it has shaped us. For most of human history, traveling meant servants, animals, and trunks heavy enough to bury someone in. Movement was a privilege, and the things you brought with you announced exactly how much of a privilege it was.
Today, a 20-something can roll a single carry-on through six countries and call it a year. That's quiet revolution — built one hinge, one handle, one wheel at a time. This is the story of how a humble container helped redraw the lines of who gets to move, and how lightly we get to do it.
Before the suitcase, there were trunks
Travel luggage, for most of recorded history, was a heavy wooden trunk designed to be carried by someone other than its owner. Through the 18th and most of the 19th centuries, the trunk was the dominant form of personal baggage — a wooden carcass, often covered in a thin layer of leather for waterproofing, reinforced with iron bands at the corners, and finished with brass hardware and a heavy lock.
Two practical details defined the era. First, the tops were almost always curved or domed — partly to shed rainwater on a ship's deck, partly because flat surfaces required carpentry most makers didn't bother with. Second, the entire system assumed someone else would do the lifting. Trunks were furniture in transit. They sat in cargo holds and luggage cars. They were unloaded by porters at hotels. They were never wheeled to the curb by the person whose name was on them.
What differentiated one trunk from another was almost entirely workmanship: the quality of the leather, the precision of the hand-cut joinery, the elegance of the brass corners, the lining inside (silk, velvet, quilted canvas), and the level of personalization. Stagecoach-era trunks were smaller and sturdier, built for rough roads. The railroad and steamship era that followed produced larger, more refined steamer trunks — named for the ships that carried them — fitted out almost like miniature wardrobes, with drawer trays, hanging compartments, and sometimes built-in writing desks or shoe cubbies.
By the mid-19th century, a small group of European trunk-makers had carved out a luxury market for the newly mobile rich. Goyard in Paris, with roots reaching back to 1792 and a relaunch in 1853 under François Goyard. Moynat in Paris, founded in 1849. John Pound in London, since 1823. Hartmann in Bavaria, from 1877. Each was building, in their own way, the same answer to the same problem: how to move a wealthy person's life from one city to another without ruining their clothes. And then a former trunk-packer from Paris quietly changed the geometry of the answer.
When a flat top changed everything
The modern luggage industry effectively begins in 1858, when Louis Vuitton — who had opened his first Paris workshop in 1854 — introduced the Malle de Cabine: the first rectangular, flat-topped trunk. Until that moment, almost every trunk on the market had a curved top. Vuitton flattened it, and three things changed at once.
The first was geometry. Flat tops meant trunks could be stacked in the cargo hold of a steamship or in a train's luggage car. More belongings could travel with more passengers, more efficiently. Wealthy families could pack a season's worth of clothes into a tidy column instead of a sprawl. The shape of the trunk reshaped the cargo hold, and the cargo hold reshaped what travel could mean.
The second was the material. Vuitton replaced heavy leather coverings with a coated canvas — the gray Trianon canvas, developed in the late 1850s — which was lighter, more durable, and, crucially, waterproof. He was, in retrospect, one of the first luggage makers to think seriously about weight.
The third was the interior. Vuitton designed his trunks like miniature, organized rooms: compartments for shirts, drawers for accessories, padded sections for hats, removable trays. His later wardrobe trunks stood upright and opened to reveal hanging clothes on one side and a column of small drawers on the other — a piece of luggage that turned into a closet. It was the first time a piece of luggage had been engineered around the things inside it, rather than against the rain outside it.
The other masters of the trunk
Vuitton's flat-top design was quickly imitated, then specialized. Two other Parisian houses pushed the trunk in their own directions, and what they made was every bit as inventive.
Moynat, founded in 1849, became the great chronicler of new modes of transport. The house registered patents for railway trunks and, by the early 20th century, had become the unofficial outfitter of the automobile. Its 1902 Limousine trunk featured a concave underside designed to sit flush against the curved roof of an early car — a trunk shaped to match a vehicle. It was a remarkable idea, and one that would prefigure, by more than a century, the way luggage is now engineered to fit overhead bins.
Goyard, refounded by François Goyard in 1853, took the visual route. The house developed its hand-painted chevron canvas — a Y-shaped repeating pattern still applied by hand today — and built a reputation around discretion. While Vuitton's monogram became globally recognizable, Goyard chose deliberate scarcity. Both approaches still feel modern: one brand that wants to be seen, one that wants to be recognized.
What unites all of them is a single design instinct: that travel is not a chore to be solved with utility, but a craft to be honored with detail. That instinct is still, quietly, inside every well-made bag.
The suit's case
The word "suitcase" arrived in the late 19th century, and the object behind it was a smaller, lighter cousin of the trunk. Mass tourism was beginning to take hold, and the suitcase was originally designed to hold dress suits — hence the name. Early versions were leather or steel; by the 1930s, lighter materials like cardboard and early plastics had started taking over.
This was the moment travel began to scale down. The trunk implied an entourage. The suitcase implied an individual — someone who could pack their own clothes, lift their own bag, board a train without help. The aristocratic logistics of travel began, slowly, to flatten.
When America made it tough
The Old World wrote the romance of the trunk. The New World made it practical. In 1910, a luggage salesman named Jesse Shwayder opened a small factory in Denver, Colorado, with his father and four brothers. The first product was a wooden trunk reinforced with metal corners. He called it the Samson, after the biblical strongman, and built the company's reputation on a single unromantic claim: this thing will not break.
The advertising made the point. Through the 1920s and '30s, Shwayder ran photographs of his entire family — five grown men in suits — standing on a single suitcase to prove it could hold them. By the 1930s, the Denver factory was the most modern luggage plant in the world. In 1939, the company introduced its first suitcase under the Samsonite name: a tapered case covered in vulcanized fiber with leather binding, the prototype of every affordable mid-century American suitcase that followed.
Samsonite didn't reinvent the suitcase. It democratized it. Where Vuitton, Moynat, and Goyard built objects for a wealthy mobile elite, Samsonite built objects for a middle class that was, for the first time, starting to fly.
When Germany made it light
In Cologne, another lineage was forming. In 1898, Paul Morszeck opened a small workshop making leather and wooden travel trunks. For the first three decades, the company looked much like its European peers. Then, in 1937, a fire swept through the factory and destroyed nearly all the materials inside. The only thing left intact, the story goes, was aluminum.
Paul's son Richard — who had renamed the company Rimowa, an acronym of Richard Morszeck Warenzeichen — decided to lean into the survivor. That same year, he produced what is widely considered the world's first all-aluminum suitcase. The material was lighter than wood, stronger than leather, and aesthetically aligned with the most modern thing in the world at that moment: the airplane. In 1950, Rimowa added the grooved aluminum shell, its parallel ridges inspired directly by the corrugated fuselage of the Junkers F 13, the first all-metal passenger aircraft.
Where Samsonite made luggage tough, Rimowa made it light. Both were responding to the same underlying shift — the rise of air travel — and between them they wrote the design language of the jet age.
The wheels nobody wanted
For a strange stretch of history — almost a century — suitcases had no wheels. The idea seems obvious now. At the time, it wasn't.
In 1970, Bernard Sadow, an American luggage executive, was wrestling two overstuffed suitcases through customs at a Puerto Rican airport with no porter in sight. He noticed a worker rolling heavy machinery on a wheeled platform and had the thought that should have arrived decades earlier: put the wheels on the bag itself.
He filed for a patent that February and was granted U.S. Patent #3,653,474 in 1972, while Macy's was already selling his "luggage that glides." The industry resisted. For years, wheeled luggage was dismissed by retailers as unmasculine — a porter's tool, not a traveler's. Sadow had to convince department stores one by one. They told him no one would pull a bag with wheels.
What made his version stick wasn't only the wheels. It was the cultural timing. Airports were getting larger. Porters were getting scarcer. More women were traveling alone for work. The suitcase finally answered a question travelers had stopped expecting anyone to answer for them: who's carrying this?
Upright, finally
Sadow's design had wheels, but it still wobbled, tipped, and dragged behind the traveler at an awkward angle. The next leap came from a pilot.
In 1987, Robert Plath — a Northwest Airlines pilot working in his garage in Boca Raton, Florida — added two wheels and a long telescoping handle to a suitcase, then turned it upright. He called it the Rollaboard. He started selling it to fellow flight crews, then to passengers who spotted them in airport corridors and asked where they could get one. He eventually left flying to found Travelpro.
The Rollaboard quietly rewrote how people moved through airports. The suitcase stood up. The traveler walked beside it, hand on a handle, looking forward instead of down. You could see human posture change inside two decades.
Hard shells, smart cases, and the carry-on life
In 2000, Dieter Morszeck — Richard's son — released the first polycarbonate suitcase. Polycarbonate was lighter than aluminum, more impact-resistant, and could be molded into curves the older metal couldn't reach. Within a decade, polycarbonate hard shells had become the dominant high-end form factor.
Four-wheel spinners replaced two-wheel tilts, letting bags glide alongside the traveler instead of behind. In the 2010s, "smart" suitcases arrived with GPS trackers and USB charging ports — until lithium-ion battery fires in cargo holds prompted most airlines to ban them as checked luggage.
The bigger shift wasn't technological. It was cultural. A whole generation of travelers — remote workers, weekenders, people building portable lives — decided they could live out of a single carry-on. The smaller the suitcase, the longer the trip seemed to last. Constraint, it turned out, was a form of freedom.
What the suitcase has done to us
The suitcase changed travel by making it possible to move without help. We tend to talk about objects shaping us only in retrospect, but this one is a useful exception.
When Vuitton flattened the trunk, he made longer travel viable for more people. When the suitcase replaced the trunk, he made solo travel possible. When Samsonite made it durable, he made it affordable. When Rimowa made it light, he made it modern. When Sadow added wheels, he made solo travel comfortable. When Plath stood it upright, he made it routine. Each shift looked small. Each one redrew who could move through the world without help, and how lightly they could do it.
We are, all of us now, the traveler the suitcase made: more mobile, more independent, less reliant on the household and the porter and the lifting hand. We move with what we can carry. That's a quietly radical inheritance for an object most of us never look twice at.
A few questions, briefly answered
When was the modern suitcase invented?
The suitcase as we recognize it today emerged in the late 19th century, when mass tourism made smaller, hand-portable luggage practical. It was originally designed to hold dress suits — hence the name. Earlier travelers used large, often round-topped trunks that required servants or porters to move.
Who made the first flat-top trunk?
Louis Vuitton introduced the first rectangular, flat-topped trunk — the Malle de Cabine — in 1858, four years after opening his Paris workshop. Until then, trunks had curved or domed tops to shed rainwater. The flat design made them stackable, and Vuitton paired it with a lightweight, waterproof coated canvas and a thoughtfully compartmentalized interior.
Who invented the wheeled suitcase?
Bernard Sadow, an American luggage executive, filed the first successful patent for a rolling suitcase in 1970 and was granted U.S. Patent #3,653,474 in 1972. His design had four casters and a flexible pull strap. The upright, two-wheeled Rollaboard with a telescoping handle came later, invented in 1987 by Northwest Airlines pilot Robert Plath in his Boca Raton garage.
When was the first aluminum suitcase made?
Rimowa, founded in Cologne in 1898 by Paul Morszeck, produced the first aluminum suitcase in 1937, after a factory fire left aluminum as one of the only intact materials. The now-iconic grooved aluminum shell — inspired by the corrugated fuselage of the Junkers F 13 aircraft — was added in 1950.
A closing reflection
The suitcase is rarely the thing we remember about a trip. It sits in hotel rooms and overhead bins and airport corners, doing its job quietly while we get on with ours. But the way we travel now — lighter, freer, more independently — is built on a century and a half of small structural decisions, made by people most of us will never name.
At SOTIYO, we think about this a lot. The objects that move with us shape what's possible inside the movement. A good carry system disappears into your day. A bad one becomes the day. When something works, you notice the city, the people, the light — not the bag on your shoulder.
If this kind of thinking interests you, the ROAM LINES series gathers conversations and reflections from people who've spent careers thinking about movement, design, and the spaces in between. Subscribe to get new pieces in your inbox each month — or pick another to read next.
