On April 26, 1956, fifty-eight enormous boxes holding truck bodies were loaded on a refitted oil tanker in Newark and sent on their way to Houston: The age of the shipping container was born. This book tells the little-known story of how shipping containers—essentially uniform steel or aluminum boxes easily loaded on ships, trucks, and trains—created a huge industry while gutting another, energized some ports while destroying others, and reduced shipping prices to encourage massive global trade.
It is difficult to remember a time before shipping containers, when moving anything across the seas and highways was a costly undertaking requiring teams of dockworkers to load and unload materials piece by piece. (Cargo handling often cost more than the sea voyage itself, Levinson shows.) Enter Malcom McLean, a trucker who hit upon the idea of trailers that could be easily transferred from trucks to ships.
Through innovation and persistence, McLean and his company promoted the concept of standardized containers and the process needed to move them efficiently. It wasn't an idea that caught on quickly—only McLean's ability to supply troops in the Vietnam War validated the concept, Levinson writes. Levinson also chronicles the battles against entrenched interests such as the Interstate Commerce Commission and longshoremen's unions.
Levinson tracks the boom (and a bust) of the shipping industry as containers became larger and larger, and ships grew to accommodate them. The future might bring ships so large, carrying $1 billion in cargo, that no port could accept them, Levinson says. They will have to tie up at yet-to-be-constructed offshore, deep-water facilities.
Given the impact on today's world economy, Levinson is surprised that the history of the storage container has largely been ignored by academics. “It has no engine, no wheels, no sails: It does not fascinate those captivated by ships and trains and planes, or by sailors and pilots. It lacks the flash to draw attention from those who study technological innovation.” But for an innovation that changed the world, the lowly storage container is hard to top, he says.
Levinson is an economist in New York and formerly the finance and economics editor of The Economist.
- Sean Silverthorne