A plain steel box helped build the modern global economy.
Before the 1950s, ships were loaded by hand, crate by crate, and cargo sat in port warehouses waiting for the next vessel. Then a trucking boss named Malcom McLean had an idea: stop moving goods and start moving boxes. The standard shipping container slashed transport costs and helped build the modern global economy.
For most of history, cargo moved as 'break bulk'. Goods went from factory to a port warehouse, waited for a ship, were carried to the dockside and packed into the hold by gangs of dock workers, then unpacked, stored and handled again at the other end. Every stage added delay, cost, damage and theft. Boxes for moving freight between canal, rail and road had existed since the 18th century, but they never took over.
The breakthrough came in 1955, when Malcom McLean, a former trucking company owner, worked with the engineer Keith Tantlinger on a new kind of container: a corrugated steel box with twistlocks at each corner, so it could be stacked securely and lifted by crane. McLean's insight was that shipping was about moving cargo, not sailing ships. On 26 April 1956 he loaded 58 containers onto a converted tanker, the SS Ideal X, and sailed it from Newark to Houston.
Standardisation was the hard part. For two decades, dozens of incompatible container systems competed in the US alone. In 1963 McLean's company released its patent rights so that Tantlinger's corner fittings could become a common standard, and in 1968 the International Organization for Standardization set shared dimensions. Everyone had to compromise; McLean's own preferred 35-foot container was not adopted.
The effects were enormous. Containers cut shipping costs and times, reduced congestion and theft, and did away with most dockside warehouses. They also displaced many thousands of dock workers and transformed port cities. By 2009, about 90 per cent of the world's non-bulk cargo travelled in containers. It is one of history's clearest examples of how a boring standard can change the world.
Source: Wikipedia — Containerization · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
