Can anyone remember the days when suitcases had handles and had to be carried?
That was long, long ago, in the mists of primeval time.
Recorded history begins with the invention of the luggage wheel. The name of the inventor is not known, but legend has it that it was an enterprising and ingenious little girl in Outer Mongolia – some say it was North Korea – who received a little suitcase for her dolls as a birthday present and then proceeded to pull the wheels off her brother’s toy cars and somehow – there are different versions of how she did it – affixed them to the suitcase. The first handle was said to be an adjustable joystick, used in a secret cult, for unknown, and perhaps unspeakable ritual purposes.
The little girl’s invention quickly spread throughout the civilized world. Nobody knows why the invention was not made generations earlier – there are many theories. Almost all memory of the era when luggage was carried instead of wheeled quickly evaporated.
A few tentative attempts have been made to attract tourists to museums where antique suitcases with handles are being exhibited, so far without noticeable success.
If you have any left in your attic, you may have better luck.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
A younger cousin of the Mongolian girl, a mathematical prodigy named Ariunbold, was working on a marketing strategy to distribute the invention. It was based on a temporal-granular theory using the ratio of the radius of available wheel discs to the average size of glacial till rocks divided by the median distance between forage sources for pack horses as alternative porters. Sadly, the empirical testing went unfinished because the 19th century leather of the suitcase she was working with disintegrated. We’ll probably never know. A northern Indian anthropologists has surmised it wasn’t unspeakable rituals, but untranslatable epithets that Ariunbold was heard to repeat over several months after the collapse.
You, Tim, will be punished for doing better than I.