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

the McLeans understood that the easiest way to control costs was to get employees involved. Holding down insurance and repair bills, for example, meant having safety-conscious drivers. Novices were trained by being paired with senior drivers on the run from Winston-Salem to Atlanta. The senior driver got a bonus of one month’s pay if a man he had t

On the other hand, many dockers cherished the fact that their work was inherently casual. If a longshoreman chose not to work on any particular day, if he decided to go fishing rather than shaping, he was entirely within his rights.13 Thanks to these particularities, one sociologist observed, “More than in any other industry in a big city, it appea

On January 9, 1959, the world’s first purpose-built container crane went into operation, loading one 40,000-pound box every three minutes. At that rate, the Alameda terminal could handle 400 tons per hour, more than 40 times the average productivity of a longshore gang using shipboard winches. Similar cranes were installed in Los Angeles and Honolu

Steaming across the Atlantic took 10½ days, and unloading at the German end, where longshoremen worked around the clock, took 4 days. In sum, the ship spent half the total duration of the voyage docked in port. The last of its cargo arrived at its ultimate destination 33 days after the Warrior docked at Bremerhaven, 44 days after it departed New Yo

Malcom McLean’s shareholding, representing 88 percent of McLean Industries’ common stock, was wiped out, and he and his son Malcom McLean Jr., a vice president, were ejected from the management. Thousands of people lost their jobs.23 “Malcom never got over the U.S. Lines bankruptcy,” a longtime associate said later. He went into seclusion, shunning

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

In 1961, before the container was in international use, ocean freight costs alone accounted for 12 percent of the value of U.S. exports and 10 percent of the value of U.S. imports.

The solution to the high cost of freight handling was obvious: instead of loading, unloading, shifting, and reloading thousands of loose items, why not put the freight into big boxes and just move the boxes? The concept of shipping freight in large boxes had been around for decades. The British and French railways tried wooden containers to move ho

The container contributed to a fundamental shift in the geography of British ports. In the precontainer era, London and Liverpool had dominated Britain’s international trade, their docks and warehouses filled with goods headed to or from factories located nearby. The two ports each loaded one-quarter of Britain’s exports, with no other port handlin

Whether containerships and containerports have reached their maximum efficient size, or even larger and costlier ships and ports could give rise to yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe, is a question of considerable consequence for the world economy.8