The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

Asked later whether he had considered ways to shelter some of his wealth from the risks of entering the maritime business, his answer was an unequivocal “No.” McLean explained: “You’ve got to be totally committed.”

These waterfront realities meant that shipping was a highly labor-intensive industry in the postwar era. Depression and war had sharply curtailed the construction of privately built merchant vessels since the 1920s, so ship operators had little capital invested in the business.

What both transportation companies and shippers were slowly coming to grasp was that simply carrying ocean freight in big metal boxes was not a viable business. Yes, it produced some savings: cranes, boxes, chassis, and containerships eliminated much of the cost of loading and unloading vessels at the dock. Shippers, however, cared not about loadin

This rags-to-riches tale fails to do justice to McLean’s immense ambition. By 1935, at twenty-two years of age and with just one year of experience as a trucker, McLean owned 2 trucks and 1 tractor trailer, employed nine drivers who owned their own rigs, and had already hauled steel drums from North Carolina to New Jersey and cotton yarn to mills i

Malcom McLean’s genius was acknowledged unanimously: almost everyone save the dockworkers’ unions thought that putting freight into containers was a brilliant concept. The idea that the container would cause a revolution in shipping, though, seemed more than a little far-fetched. At best, the container was expected to help ships recover a tiny shar

The second important result of shippers’ new power in the 1970s, along with their willingness to defy the shipping cartels, was their embrace of an idea that had been a heresy: the deregulation of transportation.

It was easy enough to conclude that containers would change the business, but it was not obvious that they would revolutionize it. Containers, said Jerome L. Goldman, a leading naval architect, were “an expedient” that would do little to reduce costs. Many experts considered the container a niche technology, useful along the coast and on routes to

More problematic for many longshoremen were the social changes stemming from the disappearance of the timeworn pattern of waterfront work. Traditional skills, such as knowing how to stow cargo aboard a breakbulk ship, lost value. Older men, whose seniority had enabled them to climb from the depths of the hold to less demanding work on the deck, fou

The launch of so many vessels resulted in a quantum jump in capacity. The basic economics of containerization dictated as much. Once a ship line had made the decision to introduce containerships on a particular route, other carriers in the trade normally followed swiftly lest they be left behind. The capital-intensive nature of container shipping p