At a guess, the balls would have been a touch smaller than the bore, and the patch (a small square of cloth) would take up the difference.
Industrial-level steam engines.
Probably the banker I was recalling meant widespread use. I don’t recall seeing any until about 1980 either. I doubt I’d even heard of them.
My bank had them in 1976 – but not a lot of them, and they tended to run out of cash really fast. I left the area a year later, and didn’t have ATMs at any of my banks until 1983.
GOD YES! The first “attempt” at this were tiny little rollerskate-esque wheels, and a fucking 6" pansy-ass strap of a handle. Naturally, they didn’t work for shit, so it seems like everyone kind of gave up on wheeled luggage until the mid 90’s when they all said “huh…why don’t we just make bigger, stronger wheels, and a longer handle? It can even telescope out so it’s out of the way when you don’t want it.”
It took like 50 fucking years to come up with that? Wow…
The comedian Jim Gaffigan also has a little joke about it took humans an embarassingly long time to come up with the upside-down ketchup bottle.
“Oh, have people been complaining ketchup’s hard to get out of the bottle”?
“For like a hundred years!”
Ah, but often, what people say they want is not what they actually want.
Heinz has experimented with various forms of ketchup over the years, but always cam back to the tall, long-necked bottle of thick ketchup – because that is what people actually buy. They’ve tried thinner ketchup, that comes out of the bottle easier, wide-necked bottles where you can spoon the ketchup out, etc. None of them sold like the normal bottle. Even today, the upside-down bottles do NOT sell as well as the traditional ones. Even in the plastic squeeze bottles – the ones designed to look similar to the traditional bottles outsell the others.
So despite what they may say, people still prefer the traditional ketchup bottle when buying.
Thanks to the first post, I initially read the second post as “analogy” … the study of assholes. :smack: 
Damn, I did it again!
Still, I did read of a banker lamenting that ATMs had not been developed as fast as they could have been. He had a point.