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04/09/2007 The Box That Changed The World
51 years ago an event occurred which revolutionized the transportation industry and changed forever the way global trade is conducted. As is often the case with such events, it stemmed from an idea which now seems simple and obvious yet at the time was seen as radical and threatening to the established way of conducting business.
On April 26, 1956 fifty-eight tractor-trailers rolled onto a dock at the port in Newark, New Jersey. Each in turn pulled up alongside an old World War 2 (type T-2) oil tanker, named the Ideal-X, that had been converted to carry cargo above decks. One by one each of the tractor-trailers rolled under a crane which was then attached to the trailer. Bolts that connected the trailers to the chassis of the trucks were removed and the cranes hoisted the trailers onto the deck of the Ideal-X. Within just a few hours all 58 trailers were loaded aboard the Ideal-X which then set sail for the port of Houston, Texas where the whole process was reversed.
That seemingly simple action of converting fixed truck trailers to removable cargo shipping containers changed the transportation industry forever. It reduced the cost of loading goods onto ships from $6 a ton to $0.16 a ton. Ships that had taken weeks to load by the old method of break-bulk loading, now took mere hours to load (and unload). Dockside productivity literally rose by a thousand times.
Containerization is the key element in intermodal transportation, that is, the use of standardized shipping containers that can go from truck to rail to ship and back to truck without unpacking and repackaging the contents. These containers and the entire intermodal transportation network that has been built around them, have made global trade and our modern lifestyle possible.
A recent BBC report summed up the effects of the containerized intermodal transportation system by noting: “..without them, (containers) it is very unlikely that we would be buying Japanese TVs, Costa Rican bananas, Chinese underwear or New Zealand lamb…In fact, globalization would probably not exist and the World Trade Organization would have a lot less to talk about.”
The Trucker With A Vision
The revolution in global trade brought about by containerization is largely the result of one truck driver’s vision. Early in his career Malcom McLean realized that the break-bulk system of unloading a truck item by item, then transferring and storing each item individually into the cargo holds of a freighter, was hopelessly inefficient.
McLean conceived of a pre-loaded containerized cargo system which would not only streamline the handling of cargo, but would also protect it from the elements and the very real problem of theft. The heart of the system consisted of sealed cargo containers that could be quickly transferred from one mode of transport to another.
Though the idea seems absurdly simple and logical now, it was opposed at nearly all levels. Unions were afraid of losing jobs, port operators, shipping companies and railroads did not want to invest in expensive new equipment, and even the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission saw no need for a change.
Malcom McLean however persisted with the idea. Using his own money he financed the first voyage of the Ideal-X. That voyage proved the efficiency of McLeans’s concept. Over the next 15 years, through many ups and downs, the various sectors of the transportation industry, (truck, rail and maritime) gradually saw the inevitability of containerization.
Ten years after the voyage of the Ideal-X the first international voyage of a container ship took place and the concept began to take hold globally. Eventually international standards for containers and their carriers were agreed upon and the industry grew to become the backbone of international trade that it is today.
Intermodal Containers – Facts and Figures
The trucking industry is the base upon which the entire intermodal transportation system depends. Almost all containers begin and end their journeys aboard trucks. Trains and ships are used to transport containers across oceans and continents, but trucks bring those containers from manufacturers and distributors to the rail hubs and ports, and take them to their final destinations.
In 2004 some 11-million rail-truck intermodal containers were handled in the United States. 35,000 trucks a day in the U.S. visit ports to pick up or drop off containers. The U.S. has its own domestic standard containers of 48 ft. and 53 ft. in length, which is the length of standard U.S. commercial trailers. International standard container lengths are 20 ft., 40 ft., and 45 ft. Containers, and the capacity of container ships, are measured in twenty-foot equivalent units, TEUs. (Currently, the world’s largest container ship, the MSC Pamela has a carrying capacity of 9,200 TEUs). The standard 40-foot container (equivalent to 2 TEUs), has approximately 2,400 cubic feet of useable space.
There are an estimated 22 million shipping containers worldwide. Each year they make more than 200 million individual trips aboard the worlds’ 7,936 container ships. Excluding bulk materials, more than 90% of all the cargo in the world is at one point or another transported in a shipping container. In 2005 the total value of goods transported in cargo containers was $6.5 trillion. | 
