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I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
I am confident there are many insights out there that remain to be "discovered" that will seem obvious in retrospect. So much of the history of human progress is discovering obvious (in retrospect) insights. Even something as simple as wheels on luggage. People pushed luggage around on wheeled carts for decades before figuring out we should just put wheels on the damn suitcases. Insights from Taleb and Mandelbrot about tail risks and black swans are another good example of something "obvious" that it took smart people a long time to come to terms with. It's really hard to see obvious things until they are pointed out.
Is this true, though? Wheels are only effective if they're large relative to the bumps on the surface you're using them on. Modern wheeled luggage (2 inch wheels) is only effective on smooth, swept concrete surfaces. And those are a quite modern invention (maybe we can blame the ADA here?), at least in quantity as far as I can tell. Having once lugged a wheeled suitcase a mile on cobbled European roads, a cart would have worked better. I wouldn't even try on an unpaved road.
Yeah, wheels add volume and weight to the luggage that is not required at all times (most of the use time of luggage is spent not being wheeled around). Weight and volume that travelers pay for in one way or another. The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality, with little way for the customer to know whether this luggage's wheel are durable, or if they will start blocking and dragging everywhere after 3 trips.
Though my experience of wheeled luggages breaking all the time might be personal; coming from a city with a lot of snow and ice, slippery surfaces are dealt with with pebbles, sand, salts/other chemicals, which remain on streets, sidewalk and indoors floors where people come in with their outdoor shoes (airports, shopping malls, hotel lobbies) for a significant portion of the year, even after the snow and ice are gone. These wreak havoc on small wheels.
I've heard a theory that this was the problem: if even modern wheels are of dubious quality and capability, how much worse would they have been a hundred years ago? I'm not sure that makes sense, though. The invention of wheeled luggage is at roughly the same time the transition of roller skates from all-metal wheels to hard polymer wheels (which were lighter and smoother-rolling and less expensive), but all-metal wheels aren't that much worse in utility and they were probably better for durability. The most important invention for small wheels is ball bearing support, and that's more like 100-150 years old (at various levels of quality and expense).
The two other common theories are more situational:
Wheeled luggage came about during the expansion of mass air travel, with it's corresponding huge concourses and lack of porters. This was the first time people really had reason to want to carry their own luggage for long distances.
Wheeled luggage came about shortly after the Women's Rights Movement made it more common for women to travel on their own, and whereas a typical man would feel weak if he avoided carrying his own luggage, a typical woman would feel foolish if she didn't.
I'm not sure either of these really works either, though. Wheeled luggage was invented in 1970, but as another comment points out it didn't become popular until the 1990s. Perhaps that's because of the addition of the retractable handle (invented in 1987) finally making them more ergonomic to roll around? And maybe 17 years isn't too painfully long for someone to come up with that idea once it finally had a use case; "The Retractable Handle" isn't exactly the sort of thing you find at the start of the Civ tech tree next to "The Wheel".
The typical man should still feel this way. Traveling with something like a Cotopaxi backpack is superior for the vast majority of applications to the point where I wonder how so many people got psyopped into using these unwieldy rollers that I watch them fighting to fit into overhead compartments.
Even still, all this does is shift the explanation from one product to another. Backpacks have been around for a while, but they were mostly limited to outdoor and military applications. It wasn't until the 1980s that they became popular for carrying books to school, and it probably wasn't until the 2000s that you began to see them used among normal tourists who weren't going on vacations that would require them to carry everything around with them for long distances. The typical tourist or business traveler who stays in a hotel and travels by car wouldn't use one.
That being said, I own more backpacks than Imelda Marcos owns shoes, and I still use traditional wheeled luggage for most of my normal travel. Why? Because they keep clothes folded. I don't fly much so I rarely use the wheels and could probably do without them, but it's much easier to keep everything together when it's in a rigid box. I would add that I'm also the kind of person who makes use of hotel dressers and closets, despite my tendency to avoid overpacking through the realization that unless I'm going out to dinner a lot or am engaging in messy activities I'm probably going to wear more or less the same thing the entire time I'm away.
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