What a shipping container changed

Before the box, a ship was a puzzle of barrels, sacks, and crates, packed and unpacked by longshore gangs at every port. After the box, a ship was a stack of identical steel rectangles, and the port became a machine for moving them.

Malcolm McLean, a trucking entrepreneur, is the name most histories attach to the modern container. He was not the first person to put cargo in a box. He was the one who treated the box as something that should move by truck, rail, and ship without anyone opening it. On April 26, 1956, the converted tanker Ideal-X left Newark for Houston with fifty-eight containers on deck. The cargo was not exotic. The point was that the longshoremen in Houston would lift the boxes off and put them on chassis, and the freight inside would not be touched.

Before that, ocean freight was breakbulk. A ship was a hold full of barrels, sacks, crates, and loose machinery, stowed by people who knew how to keep a load from shifting. Loading and unloading could take as long as the voyage. Every port was a place where the cargo was handled again, and every handling was a chance to steal, break, or misplace it. The cost of a product on a far shelf was, in no small part, the cost of all those hands. Pilferage was not a footnote. It was a line in the rate.

Standard sizes took longer than the first voyage. Through the 1960s the International Organization for Standardization settled the familiar lengths — 20 and 40 feet — and the corner castings a crane could grab. The 20-foot box became the counting unit, the TEU, so a ship or a port could be described in one number. Once the dimensions locked, the expensive machines were worth building: cellular ships with guides in the hold, gantry cranes on the quay, deeper berths, rail yards laid out for stacked trains. A port that would not buy the machines could not take the ships. The standard was a door, and it closed on the ports that stayed small.

The labor consequence was brutal and uneven. Breakbulk work had employed large gangs for days. A container crane and a small crew could turn a ship in hours. Unions on the U.S. coasts, including the International Longshoremen’s Association on the East Coast and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on the West, spent the 1960s and 1970s trading jurisdiction and manning rules for a share of the productivity. Some longshoremen became crane operators and earned more. Many of the jobs simply ended. Ports that rebuilt themselves around containers captured trade. Ports that would not, or could not, faded into bulk cargo, fishing, or memory. The box did not ask whether a waterfront neighborhood was ready.