April 20, 2006
The Shipping Container Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST President Bush this morning welcomed President Hu of China to the White House with all the pomp and circumstance appropriate to a summit meeting of the leaders of two Great Powers. Without a doubt high on the agenda for discussion today will be the trade gap between the two countries, which last year yawned to no less than $202 billion in China’s favor. There are many reasons for that gap, China’s artificially undervalued currency for one, its cheap labor for another, its relative lack of concern for the environment for a third. But there’s a fourth important reason: the cargo container. Some inventions are just, well, sexy, and some aren’t, no matter how important. It didn’t take a genius to see that once the Wright brothers proved it practicable, the airplane would have an immense impact on the twentieth century. But consider the stirrup. It seems about as boring as inventions come. Indeed it is so obvious in retrospect, it’s a wonder it took so long to be invented in the first place. But it appeared in India and, within a few generations, made its way to Europe only about the time of Charlemagne. The stirrup made riding a horse much more secure and safe, to be sure, but it did a lot more than that. It made it possible for the rider to use a lance against an opponent while still holding his seat. Thus the stirrup made mounted knights—the tanks of medieval warfare—possible. The high costs of armor, war horses, etc., powered the development of the feudal system, in which land was granted in return for military obligations. The stirrup was thus one of the prime creators of the Middle Ages. The cargo container is another boring but deeply important invention, and next week will be its fiftieth anniversary. Much of the expense of freight transportation has always lain in “breaking bulk,” when goods are transferred from one form of transportation, such as a ship, to another, such as a truck or a train. Since men first went down to the sea in ships, cargo was loaded on board piecemeal and unloaded the same way. Modern cargo ships required sometimes hundreds of stevedores to be unloaded quickly, and then the cargo had to be loaded piece by piece onto trucks or trains. In the early 1950s an American trucking executive named Malcom (that’s the way he spelled it) McLean had a better idea: put the cargo in aluminum and steel containers that could fit on flatbed railroad cars or trucks. A few crane operators could load or unload a ship and the goods be on their way to their final destination in a matter of hours. On April 26, 1956, a converted oil tanker sailed out of Newark, New Jersey, bound for Houston, with 58 cargo containers on her deck, and the world of global trade changed.
The shipping container lowered the price of overseas freight transportation as much as 94 percent. Creating the infrastructure and negotiating with longshoremen’s unions took a while, of course, although the immense shipping needs of the Vietnam War gave the cargo container a crucial boost. But as the use of containers spread, the cost of goods brought in from overseas began to decline rapidly. As their prices dropped, demand soared, and the global economy developed quickly.
Not bad for a boring box.
For an in-depth look at the history of the cargo container, I’d recommend The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson.
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