90% of international trade is transported by sea. The merchandise travels in one of the 20,000 metal boxes that a cargo ship can transport. A humble container. “Globalization as we know it today would not have been possible without the container,” says Marc Levinson. He is an economist and historian. And he tells how containers transformed the world.
The first commercially successful container voyage occurred in April 1956 aboard a converted military ship, the Ideal X. It transported 58 containers from New Jersey to Texas. The architect of the voyage was Malcom McLean, the visionary creator of the modern commercial maritime transportation system.
Visionary
He was a trucking businessman born in 1914 into a farming family in North Carolina. At that time, shipping was almost a nightmare.
In the 1950s just the logistics of loading and unloading ships was a gigantic challenge. Much of the work was done by hand. The cargo was arranged inside the ship manually, and this generated delays of days or weeks.
Loading and unloading a ship took the same number of days as a sea trip. And then McLean appeared. He became convinced that the use of containers was the future of international trade. He had strong resistance. There was no agreement on the size standard to use for containers. Longshoremen’s unions feared losing their jobs. The ports did not want to recondition their operations.
Until the day came when he found his big client: the United States Army. McLean exploited a legal loophole to gain control of a shipping company and a trucking company. When the dockers went on strike, he took advantage. He adapted the old ships to the specifications of their containers. And he encouraged the Port Authority of New York to create a container hub on one side of the city’s dock.
Transforming the world
The Army saw McLean’s idea as the solution to its problems sending military equipment to Vietnam. Transport with containers is much more efficient if it is part of a comprehensive logistics system. Upon returning from Vietnam, his ships could bring back containers full of payload from the world’s fastest growing economy, Japan. That’s how it all started.
Soon, containers transformed the world. Ship loading costs were immediately reduced by 36 times. Times improved incredibly. And the sea was filled with ships carrying thousands of containers per trip. And all because a visionary had an idea.
