Trunk calls: specialist luggage from Louis Vuitton from yesteryear

Goyard left the Rue Neuve des Capucines for the Rue Saint-Honoré just before Vuitton moved in. Today, timeless style and craftsmanship push aside fashion frivolity with artisanal heritage for just £4,000 at Vuitton - for a small case. A bashed 19th-century antique trunk would reach more than five times that sum today. In 1837, at the age of 15, Louis Vuitton had walked 292 miles from his home in the Jura to Paris and signed on as apprentice to Monsieur Maréchal on the Rue Saint-Honoré. From his novice's world in the age of Victor Hugo to his own shop on Rue Neuve des Capucines took Vuitton 17 years.

The Second Empire had arrived in 1851 following a coup d'état, luminaries such as Hugo went into voluntary exile, Haussmann reconfigured Paris, and Vuitton reshaped the way to pack clothes.

In particular his shop attracted clients such as the Empress Eugénie and, by 1855, produced a cutting-edge wonder called the slat trunk. Not only did its grey canvas sheathing make it lighter and more waterproof than leather, but its diverse arrangement of drawers and cubbyholes could hold a week's worth of outfits. And unlike the round-topped trunks in fashion at the time, Vuitton's were rectangular, allowing them to be stacked, as they soon were, in the first-class suites of transatlantic liners steaming out from Cherbourg, and on the newly expanded railways that accompanied an economic boom.

From Asnières-sur-Seine in 1859, the cradle of the business, to the Rayée canvas of the 1870s, the unpickable lock of 1886, and the LV mark a decade later, Vuitton has been turning trunks into treasure chests for several generations of travellers. The Noé bag, originally designed to carry champagne in 1932 is particularly useful. Now languid advertising videos hone in on the intricacies of process, spotlighting craftsmanship in retaliation against the counterfeit behemoth that the firm faces today. By 1900 Cook's Tours to Switzerland were recording thousands of visits annually, and a summer day could draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to British beaches. Travel was no longer just for the wealthy.

Suitcases began as an afterthought in the luggage and leather-goods business, but they soon became the very symbol of travel. An 1897 wholesale price list included the words 'suit case' only twice in a 20-page list of luggage types. By 1907 a brochure from Eaton & Co could still take up to a full page with trunks while suitcases share a page with club bags and valises. Yet by 1911 in the United Company catalogue nearly half of the advertisements were for suitcases.

Lighter and more portable than trunks, cases were still bulky by today's standards. Leather, wicker or thick rubbery cloth was stretched over a rigid wood or steel frame.

Corners were rounded out using brass or leather caps. Until steamship travel declined during the mid-20th century, many were advertised as waterproof. Lightweight models were often marketed specifically for women.

As trunks went out of style, suitcases took on not just practical but also cultural significance.

By the Twenties, suitcases featured in books and films symbolic of both mobility and mystery. During the Depression in the Thirties, farmers who worked away from home were called 'suitcase farmers'. Suitcases still had a ways to go before achieving their present form.

With the rapid expansion in car travel and a more gradual expansion of air travel a couple of decades later, suitcases found new applications but also new kinds of competition. A 1933 business report written for President Roosevelt by one Hugh Johnson, an administrator in the National Recovery Administration, put it this way: 'With the increase in the use of automobiles, it has become easy to utilize simple cardboard containers secured at little or no cost, in the back of the automobile in lieu of luggage.' Suitcases, in other words, had to get lighter and cheaper if they wanted to compete. The robust wood, steel, and heavy leather suitcase gave way to cardboard and plastic models that emphasised 'modern' materials and convenience, but also for them to be accommodated in spaces very different to the capacious and seemingly limitless hold of a ship. They also had to get tougher.

The Bluesmart bag can be locked and weighed remotely, among other functions, via a smartphone

Samsonite had been founded in 1910 in Denver by Jesse Shwayder and his four brothers. In the Thirties, the American Tourister cost just $1, then in 1941 the firm introduced Streamlite made by covering a wooden frame with vulcanised fibre given a rawhide effect. The magnesium-reinforced ABS-document case arrived in 1962, and the first Samsonite on wheels appeared in 1974. In 2000 it made its first aluminium product that harked back to an earlier era of travel, the stainless-steel railway carriages, Inox coaches (so-called after acier inoxydable) that were based on the American streamliners, and appeared on the Mistral express (the fastest train in Europe for 50 years) and later on some of the Trans Europe Express trains.

From the lightweight Fifties' aluminium cases that resembled the Junkers JU52 aircraft they flew in, travellers rolled into a new era on the short-lived American patent 3,653,474 - Bernard Sadow's first attempt at wheeled luggage - in 1972. Then, Northwestern's Bob Plath reorientated the suitcase, added a telescopic handle and wheels for flight crew, and sold it to the rest of us from 1989 as the Travelpro. Polycarbonate cases quickly followed, only to be surpassed by the four wheeled push-pull-spin rollaboard bags, and inevitably the baggage repercussions of 9/11 and beyond.

It takes around 18 months to develop and test a new piece of luggage. And test it they do: tumbling, jerking, heating, repeatedly subjecting what will become your precious bag to every conceivable indignity and abuse before it hits the shops.

A wheeled trunk was patented in 1887, and a wheeled suitcase in 1945. Neither caught on. In the two decades before Sadow's patent, flights had increased their passenger totals by tenfold, from 17 million in 1949 to 172 million in 1969. That was also the year that set records for the most plane hijackings in a year, with an astonishing 82 - which contributed to increasingly strict baggage checks that funnelled passengers through longer lines on the way to centralised security checkpoints.

Some 3.1 billion people took a flight in 2013. IATA anticipates that by this year there will be more than 1.45 billion international passengers. Travel is safer, faster, and cheaper, and many times more stressful - and they charge to check in baggage. There are those that insist on trying to fit a 36in suitcase into a 24in overhead bin. Survey frequent flyers and two thirds say they have experienced some sort of delay or loss of baggage in the previous 12 months. Compensation is paltry, regardless of whether your clothes are from H&M or Hermès. Maybe that's why some years ago Robotronic began working on a robot suitcase that will 'follow' its owner, using gyroscopes, ultrasound and light detectors to help it avoid other objects. Perhaps we'll never lose a suitcase again - or have to carry one.

But now the market is moving fast towards smart luggage for the connected age in which we live. We used to go for durability. It had to be tough. But now we look for technology to go with that. And the push towards all of these developments is lost luggage. The race is on to develop and launch bags controlled by smartphone with a bluetooth-enabled lock, GPS tracking and a USB port for recharging a device of your choice. They overwhelmed last year's Travel Goods Association trade show in Las Vegas.

The Bluesmart bag can be locked and weighed remotely, among other functions, via a smartphone

Having attracted 10,000 backers convinced that this was the way to go, after two years Bluesmart finally began to deliver connected bags in December. If your Bluesmart bag gets rerouted by an airline, you can track it, wherever it ends up in the world. You can control your suitcase from your phone, you can even lock it, and weigh it remotely plus, with the firm's app, you can receive smart alerts and track all your travel data. The business was funded via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, with backers contributing more than $2m. The result is a small $400 carry-on bag that in the first month of sales attracted both wow reviews and disappointment. That's retail.

While AT&T is researching the possibilities, Samsonite launched a new line in cases last year made of ballistic-weave nylon, the GeoTrakR, that has a baggage-tracking system activated by your mobile phone. Cheaper than Bluesmart and available in a range of sizes, it works; it does what it says on the bag. Well, it is Samsonite. Andiamo is about to introduce a $600 bag with a Wi-Fi hotspot and battery charger among other extras.

Pluggage is the name of the smart suitcase line of products to be introduced this year by Delsey, on which the company is consulting with Air France. Rimowa was the first to launch connected bags with its Bag2Go, produced in association with Airbus and Deutsche Telekom. Last October it won the 'best baggage initiative' award at the Future Travel Experience Global Conference.

Trunkster's Kickstarter bags will have tracking devices, battery chargers, and USB ports when they finally arrive later this year. A mass production pilot was begun in December.

Seen, but not yet touched, Hontus has the Smart Case 1 also due to be launched this year and marketed at $600-$700 under the Planet Traveler USA brand, with digital locks, bluetooth speakers and tracking enabled via a smartphone.

They all claim to be the best, the most connected, technologically advanced, fully integrated digital mobility solution for baggage, and most of them are arriving significantly later than scheduled. The new start-ups and the established firms all claim to be the first in the market. They just cannot get there fast enough.

Considering the speed at which lightweight luggage, expandable cases and four-wheeled bags all rapidly became staple travel products, these new ideas will spread quickly. And this is just the first wave of new product development that is set to take off.

All of the personal electronic devices that are quickly being incorporated into the new bags are designed to shut down automatically on board a plane and automatically turn on once it has landed. If you do not want to replace your existing bags aim not to lose them, with the help of location devices such as Trakdot and LugLoc.

Samsonsite has launched its new range of cases in GepoTrakR, a material that has a bag-tracking system activated by smartphone

There's an irony to the shape of these modern suitcases. They have come a long way from the flat and stackable 'dress-suit case', shaped almost as those unwieldy trunks that Phileas Fogg preferred to leave at home. A century of revolution in transportation, in other words, seems to have brought us back to the hefty trunk shape that the first suitcases replaced. Just as we might pack and repack our belongings to fit our luggage, we make and remake our luggage to fit our built world.

I began this in the Pas-de-Calais by way of youthful escape from an England still subject to rationing, social deference and the deferral of pleasure. A few years ago BAA commissioned Alain de Botton to write a literary flow chart of life among the baggage handlers of Heathrow. His fee was twice the annual salary of a baggage handler. Whether or not BAA made good use of his manuscript is another matter, so long as it was not lost in transit, so bad is its catastrophic record of handling luggage.

When Heathrow's Terminal 5 was opened in 2008, 20,000 bags were mislaid, causing cancellation of 430 flights. Now it works.

Just one in 5,000 bags goes missing. Heathrow has always concentrated on just about anything, mainly shopping, at the expense of the more humdrum business of the arrival and departure of aeroplanes. I still do not trust them not to lose my bags.

My hope is that this article will leave you wanting more, or at least another bag!