Wed Sept 4, 2024
Today' selection--from Frostbite by Nicola Twilley. Though largely unheralded, starting in 1956, Malcolm McLean’s shipping containers brought “a logistics revolution that would fast-track globalization”:
“Unrefrigerated shipping containers made their commercial debut on a rainy Thursday in 1956, when Pratt was not yet two years old. These now-ubiquitous metal boxes were the brainchild of Malcom McLean, the forty-two-year-old son of a poor North Carolina farmer who had built his own successful trucking empire and then sold it all in order to buy a struggling steamship line, despite never having set foot on a boat in his life. His flagship vessel, an aging oil tanker named Ideal X, was described by a contemporary reporter as an ‘old bucket of bolts.’ The innovative twist-lock corner fittings on his ‘silvery new trailer vans’ were supposed to ensure that the boxes could be lifted by crane, secured to the deck, and stacked atop one another, but had only been tested using modeling clay. Similarly, the containers' overall sturdiness was assessed by having McLean and the rest of the team climb onto their roofs and jump up and down. McLean, a man of stoic Scottish ancestry, was observed to betray a ‘twinge of anxiety’ as, over the course of eight hours, fifty-eight containers were lifted onto the deck, and the Ideal X set sail from Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“A short write-up on page thirty-nine of the next day's New York Times missed the point entirely, suggesting that McLean had simply ‘pioneered a way of making both legs of a voyage pay.’ In reality, he had set in motion a logistics revolution that would fast-track globalization by knitting together suppliers and consumers around the world in entirely new configurations-but the Times' reaction was typical. The response to the debut of the shipping container was muted, to say the least. Still, when the Ideal X arrived in Houston five days later and those fifty-eight containers were swung off the ship, set down on fifty-eight separate trailer chassis, and sent on their various ways the very same afternoon, it represented enough of a success that McLean's fledgling PanAtlantic Steamship Company expanded, rebranding itself as Sea-Land Service, Inc., to better describe its trailblazing vision of a seamless, intermodal, truck-to-ship-to-truck transportation network. Over the next few years, other companies took notice and began to follow McLean's example.
“In keeping with the general lack of fanfare surrounding the maiden voyage of the first shipping containers, no one seems to have bothered to record what was transported inside them. It's possible that it was beer—that erstwhile early adopter, first of mechanical refrigeration then, perhaps, of container shipping. Certainly, McLean's initial calculations for the new business used beer as the model cargo, demonstrating that it would be 94 percent cheaper to ship it in one of his new containers than using conventional transport. These extraordinary savings came from cutting out the time and human labor required to hoist each individual barrel of beer—or bale of cotton or box of screws—on and off a boat by hand. Before the introduction of the container, a cargo ship would typically spend as much time at berth, being loaded and unloaded, as it did at sea. This was the real significance of McLean's innovation and the Ideal X's maiden voyage: by shrinking both the time and the cost involved in maritime trade, they made today's just-in-time global supply chains possible.
“Despite these enormous advantages, container shipping took a while to catch on. Railways and trucking companies were initially reluctant to embrace this new intermodal form of transport: their existing cargo carriages and trailers represented a significant sunk cost. Throughout the sixties, as dockworkers protested at the prospect of losing their jobs, port authorities dithered about whether it was worth investing in the new cranes and facilities needed to handle shipping containers. Meanwhile, the international negotiations to agree on standard dimensions and design, so that containers would be as interchangeable as the commodities inside them, dragged on.
“Still, by the 1970s, the container had conclusively triumphed: the number of registered longshoremen on the US East Coast had decreased by two-thirds and nine out of every ten countries in the world had built deeper, crane-equipped ports to handle these enormous new box ships. The rest is the history of today's world, in which 60 percent of everything that is traded globally spends some of its life in a shipping container, and our lives are filled with products that were assembled on multiple continents from parts that have traveled the globe."
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