A brief history of the backpack: from soldier's kit to commuter staple
The backpack looks like a recent invention, a piece of gear designed for the last few decades of commuting. In fact it is one of the oldest ways of carrying things that still works, and today's commuter version is a direct descendant of equipment that is five thousand years old. This is the short history of the rucksack: why the name is German, why the military carried the design for a century, and how the bag on your back became the most honest piece of luggage a man can own.
Where the word rucksack comes from
Rucksack is the British word for the bag Americans call a backpack, and it is an import from German: Rücken means back and Sack means sack or bag. The older English word, knapsack, comes from the same Germanic family. In the German-speaking Alps of the early nineteenth century, walkers carried their gear in rucksacks, and the word travelled into English around the middle of the century along with the fashion for walking holidays. Britain kept the German word while America coined its own, which is why the same object still has two names on the same shelf.
The oldest pack we know about
The principle is far older than the word. In 1991, walkers in the Alps found the body of a man who died around 3300 BC, preserved in the ice. He is known as Ötzi, and among his gear was a backpack: a U shaped frame of hazel rods with animal hide stretched across it, carried on the back by straps. It is the oldest pack ever found, and its logic is the logic of a modern backpack. Weight carried high and close to the body, on the strongest muscles, with the hands left free. We have been carrying loads this way for thousands of years; only the materials have changed.
The military century
For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the backpack was a soldier's object. Armies needed men to carry their own food, ammunition and kit over distance, and a bag on the back beat a bag in the hand. Early military knapsacks were made of leather, stiff and heavy. Canvas arrived as the mass armies of the late nineteenth century needed cheaper, lighter gear, and the two materials worked as a pair: canvas for the body of the bag, leather for the straps and the points of wear.
The First World War made the pack standard issue for millions of men, and the Second World War refined it. British troops adopted a large canvas rucksack that they called a bergen, a name borrowed from the Norwegian city of Bergen, and the bergen stayed in service in one form or another for decades. The military years proved two things that still hold today: a bag carried on the back is the most efficient way to move weight on foot, and canvas and leather shrug off the kind of treatment that ruins a cheap bag in a season.
From the mountain to the campus
Between the wars, walking and rambling became mass leisure in Britain, and the rucksack crossed from the army to the civilian. After the Second World War the outdoor industry grew fastest in the United States. In the 1950s a Californian called Dick Kelty began building packs on aluminium frames, which lifted the load off the shoulders; in the late 1960s the internal frame, which hugs the body and keeps the weight stable, arrived and is credited to the climber Greg Lowe. In 1967 a Seattle brand called JanSport began making the soft daypack that would end up on a million student backs.
The campus years are the ones that made the backpack ordinary. By the 1970s the daypack was the default bag for students across Britain and America, and by the 1980s it had left the campus entirely. Office workers, weekend walkers and travellers adopted it, and the rucksack became the most common bag in the country. The interesting detail is that the early daypacks were mostly canvas. Nylon took over in the 1980s and 1990s because it was light and cheap, but the fabric that built the category was cotton canvas.
The laptop changed everything
The laptop is the reason the backpack stopped being casual. In the 1990s, carrying a computer to work became normal, and the briefcase was the wrong shape for it. The padded backpack was the answer: two straps spread the weight of a heavy machine evenly, which no briefcase and no single strap can do. By the 2000s the commuter backpack was a category of its own, and the laptop sleeve had become the single most important feature in the bag.
The first commuter backpacks were technical, black and nylon, and they had two problems. They looked like climbing gear in an office, and cheap nylon aged badly, sagging and scuffing within a couple of years. The reaction to those bags is what brought canvas and leather back.
The canvas and leather revival
Over the last decade, the commuter backpack has come home to the materials that built it. A waxed canvas shell sheds drizzle and rain, full-grain leather carries the wear on the straps, the base and the trim, and the bag looks better in its fifth year than its first. That combination is not nostalgia; it is the same division of labour the military worked out a century ago. Canvas takes the weather, leather takes the rubbing, and both materials improve with age instead of falling apart.
The revival suits British weather better than anywhere else, which is one reason the rucksack never really left Britain. If you are weighing the two classic materials, our waxed canvas versus leather guide lays out the trade-offs, and the canvas types guide explains the difference between waxed, dry and polyester canvas.
Why the materials matter more than the shape
The shape of the backpack has barely changed in a century: two straps, a bag on your back, the load held close and high. What separates a good one from a bad one is the making. The same history that produced the bergen produced the lesson that a bag is only as good as its materials and its seams. A canvas and leather backpack with full-grain leather straps, a padded laptop sleeve and an honest water resistant shell is the end point of five thousand years of carrying things, and as a rule it will still be doing its job after the nylon bags you owned have been replaced twice.
Our leather and canvas backpack collection is built to that recipe. If you are choosing one, the canvas backpack guide covers fit and sizing, the commuter bag guide explains what a daily bag must survive, and for a 13 inch daily load the commuter packing list shows what actually goes in it.
The travel cousin
The backpack's history runs alongside the history of the British holdall, its travel-shaped cousin. The two bags divide the week between them: the backpack carries the working days, and the holdall carries the escape. Together they are the only two bags most men need.
Five thousand years of carrying things has settled on two straps and honest materials. The backpack earned its place on the mountain, the campus and the platform, and a good one will earn its keep in your week for a decade. Buy the version made to age, and the history is on your back.
