What Took it so Long?
In one of his books, Nassim Nicolas Taleb wondered why it took so long to invent the suitcase with wheels? After all, he said, both the suitcase and the wheel had existed for long, so what took so long to put them together? He didn’t have the answer, which is why Anton Howes’ article caught my eye. Even better, the scope of his article was the generic question: why did so many such obviously simple yet useful inventions not come up much, much earlier? It’s not like they needed some other technology to be available first, or the use or need wasn’t evident. But first, suitcase on wheels apart, a few other examples: “My favourite example is John Kay’s flying shuttle, one of the most famous inventions of the British Industrial Revolution. It radically increased the productivity of weaving in the 1730s, but involved simply attaching a little extra wood and string . It involved no new materials, was applied to the weaving of wool — England’s age-old industry — and required no sp...