Rollaboard luggage celebrates a wheelie big birthday

— -- The innovation that revolutionized the traveler's world had humble beginnings.

Inventor and Northwest Airlines pilot Bob Plath's eureka moment came as he waited at an airport security checkpoint behind passengers struggling to free their bungee-cord-attached bags from bulky metal luggage trolleys. He headed for his garage workshop, tinkered a bit and returned to the airport with a luggage trolley screwed onto a hard-sided bag.

"The (security guard) said I had to take the suitcase off the trolley and I said, 'I can't,' and he said, 'OK,' and I said, 'I got 'em!' "

And the rest, as they say, is history.

It was 25 years ago that Plath's Rollaboard bag changed the orientation of a suitcase from horizontal to vertical with the simple addition of two wheels and an extending handle, bringing relief to legions of travelers. (Seventeen years earlier, luggage executive Bernard Sadow attached four wheels and a pull strap to a bag, creating the first wheeled suitcase, but the design lacked the nimbleness of Plath's upright wheeled bag.)

The Rollaboard liberated travelers from bellhops and porters. It prompted airlines to reconfigure overhead bins to accommodate 22-inch wheeled carry-ons. It sparked a new pack-light sensibility among travelers. And it inspired a slew of imitators, invigorating the travel goods market.

"The upright carry-on revolutionized the travel goods industry," says Michele Marini Pittenger, president of the Travel Goods Association.

But more recently, so have airline surcharges and government regulations, both of which have sparked innovations.

Among them:

Compressible and collapsible luggage

Bags that expand and contract for customized packing and/or compact storage garnered buzz at this year's Travel Goods Association expo. The show's first-place winner for innovation was the Road Warrior M-Series bags by Trunk & Trolley ($200-$600), which, with the pull of an interior rip cord, collapse to half their depth.

This week, New York-based Biaggi introduced a rigid, lightweight "foldable" collection (suitcases are $219-$339) that relies on a new hinge-lock technology to reduce the size of each bag by half for compact storage in tight spaces.

And Lipault of Paris' foldable bags ($189-$249), which made their debut in North America in 2010, collapse to a svelte 4 inches for practical storage.

Both Briggs & Riley and Samsonite have introduced zipperless systems that expand and contract the cases for more efficient packing. Briggs & Riley's Baseline Collection ($399-$549) features CX compression, which increases capacity by up to 34%. Samsonite's new Compressor model ($299) has interior ratchets that expand the bag's depth by 3 inches, then compresses after it's packed.

Lighter-weight bags

With most major airlines now charging for checked and overweight bags, manufacturers have embarked on a weight-loss quest. Wheeled upright carry-ons, which once typically weighed in at around 15 pounds, are down to about 5 pounds, says Pittenger. It Luggage USA has introduced what it dubs the World's Lightest 2-Wheeled Carry-on, a 20-inch bag that weighs just 3.4 pounds ($70-100). Even some larger stripped-down bags now weigh as little as 7 pounds, she adds.

Greater maneuverability

Four-wheeled cases with spinners, available from many manufacturers, make it possible to push or pull the bag, walk beside it, "swing it around or dance with it," says Pittenger. "Once you've driven a spinner, it's hard to go back."

Not that every traveler is necessarily taken with all these flourishes. Flight attendant Karissa Mackin of Denver says it's not unusual to see passengers with overstuffed expandable carry-ons jettisoning dirty clothes in the aisle in order to cram the bags into overhead bins. (She offers them a plastic bag for the overflow.) As for four-wheel spinners, Mackin recently test-drove one and concluded it's more maneuverable and might be good for older travelers or young kids, but it slowed her down on airport concourses. She remains loyal to her Travelpro FlightCrew 4 carry-on, which lacks lots of bells and whistles but is sturdy and lightweight.

It's by design that the Rollaboard is associated with flight crews. Plath initially made his Travelpro Rollaboard available exclusively to airline employees, who served as a far-flung sales force for the bag. By the time other manufacturers rolled out their own versions circa 1993, the brand name was so well established, "I didn't care if anyone was doing knockoffs," says Plath, who left Northwest Airlines to run Travelpro full time in 1991 and has since sold the company.

And while millions of travelers can thank Plath for taking a load off their shoulders, backs and various other body parts, not everyone appreciates the invention — even 25 years and many innovations later.

"I consider the invention of the Rollaboard the beginning of human devolution," says adventure travel pioneer Richard Bangs and host of American Public Television's Richard Bangs' Adventures With Purpose. "It used to be, as we ran through airports carrying our bags, there was a measure of physical exertion that countered, to a degree, the hours spent motionless in an airline seat. It toned muscles and prepared us for the adventure ahead."

Whether or not you agree with that assessment, the travel-bag evolution is bound to continue.

So what's next on the horizon?

"If I knew that, I could retire," says Pittenger with a laugh. She considers for a moment and responds, "Luggage that packs itself? Now that would be a problem-solver."