The adventurous backpack story

Anyone who has a little experience, even a little, of outdoor life and camping knows the fundamental importance that the backpack has for a successful holiday. It is important to know perfectly how to do it, how to balance the weights inside and especially with what to fill it according to the type of trip you are going to undertake.actually this time we do not want to focus our attention on the content, but on the container: how was the backpack born? Who first had the idea to invent such a useful object?

The ancient origins

We do not know with certainty how and where they started to carry weights on their shoulders, but numerous testimonies suggest that the first to realize the practicality of the backpack were the Scandinavian nomadic populations, forced to carry objects and, sometimes, the children themselves during long journeys during the winter period; loading something on their shoulders allowed them to have greater mobility in their arms and legs, especially during difficult marches in the snow. Almost at the same time, thousands of kilometres away, the Inuit population of Greenland had the same intuition, in weather conditions similar to those in Scandinavia. We can therefore say that the backpack appeared to many as an excellent idea for transport over snowy terrain. They were obviously very different from the current backpack concept we have now: they were mostly strips of fabric or leather wrapped around the shoulders and torso and then tied with knots to keep the load firmly in place.

A slightly more "modern" model

To see something more similar to today's backpack, one has to wait until 1878; in that year Hanry Merriam patented a complicated model of a bag that could be worn on the back, composed of leather straps that passed over the shoulders and an uncomfortable wooden frame that rested on the loins and served as a base for a part of the roll-up canvas in which objects could be stowed. The awareness that the back was a very complex part of the body and to be taken into account when carrying large weights came in the twentieth century: in 1908 the Norwegian Ole Bergan thought that making a wooden folding frame shaped according to his back could avoid many of the pains caused by old backpack models, which actually happened. About ten years later, an inventor named Lloyd Nelson thought that the best thing to do was to have a rigid frame on the back with two canvas "wings" held together by small straps, allowing the fabric to adapt variably to the curvature of the back. The concept of ergonomics was therefore being born, albeit unconsciously.

Towards the present day

Nelson's model was so successful that it was the first in history to be mass produced. From that moment on, patents began to follow one another rapidly, adding more and more innovations: the tubular aluminum structures, the addition of zippers for better insulation of the contents, the use of synthetic materials and much more. Up to us, who can say we have used the backpacks at least once in a lifetime, always appreciating their extreme practicality.

Do you have any anecdote about your backpack to tell us? Write to us!