The Box That Changed the World

A Before the middle of the twentieth century, loading a ship was a slow and back-breaking business. Cargo arrived at the docks as a jumble of barrels, sacks, crates and boxes of every size, and gangs of dockworkers had to carry or winch each piece aboard by hand and pack it carefully into the hold, item by item. A large ship might sit in port for a week or more while this went on; loading and unloading were among the greatest costs of any voyage, and goods left lying on the quayside were an easy target for thieves. A single voyage might involve dozens of separate handlings of the same crate as it passed from warehouse to quayside to hold, and every one of them cost time, money and the occasional broken back, while pilfering from the open cargo was so routine that it was quietly built into the price of shipping.

B The man who changed this was not a sailor but a trucking businessman from the United States named Malcom McLean. Frustrated by the hours wasted watching his lorries wait to be unloaded, he reasoned that it would be far quicker to lift a whole truck-sized box straight onto a ship without unpacking it at all. In 1956 he put the idea to the test, sending out the first voyage of a ship loaded with identical metal boxes, and the modern shipping container was born. McLean was not the first person to imagine such a thing, but he had the determination and the resources to make it work in practice, buying ships, redesigning them to carry the boxes and pressing ports to build the equipment his idea required.

C The genius of the system lay in standardisation. Because the containers were built to agreed shapes and sizes, the very same steel box could be lifted by crane from a lorry onto a ship, carried across an ocean, and set down directly onto a railway wagon or another truck at the far end, all without its contents ever being touched. This ability to move smoothly between different forms of transport, known as intermodal shipping, is what made the container so powerful. Agreement on a handful of standard sizes was the key that unlocked everything else, for it meant that a box loaded in one country could be handled by cranes, lorries and railways on the far side of the world that had never seen it before, and that ships, ports and vehicles everywhere could be built to the same convenient measurements.

D The consequences were enormous. The cost of loading cargo, once a huge share of the price of shipping, fell to almost nothing, and ports that adopted containers could handle many times the volume of goods they had before. Cheap, reliable shipping made it practical to manufacture goods on one side of the world and sell them on the other, and the container quietly became one of the engines of modern global trade, carrying a large part of everything we buy. Goods that would once have been far too costly to send across the world could now travel cheaply from factory to distant shop, and long chains of production stretched across many countries, with parts made in one place, assembled in another and sold in a third, all held together by the steady, inexpensive flow of containers. It is often said that the plain steel box did as much to knit the modern world together as any treaty or invention, and yet, because it is so dull to look at, hardly anyone notices it at all. The cheapness it created has become so ordinary that we now take for granted goods gathered from a dozen countries, forgetting that not long ago such abundance would have been unthinkable.

E Not everyone gained. The armies of dockworkers who had once loaded ships by hand were no longer needed, and their skilled, dangerous trade largely disappeared. Old, crowded ports set among city streets could not make room for the cranes and vast yards that containers demanded, and many of them declined as huge, highly automated container terminals rose in their place, often on cheaper land away from the old waterfronts. The steel box had reshaped not only trade but the very cities that trade had built. Whole districts that had lived by the docks for centuries fell quiet, their warehouses abandoned or turned to other uses, while new port cities rose around the container terminals, often in places that had been of little importance before the box arrived.