The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
by Marc Levinson · 1 Jan 2006 · 477pp · 135,607 words
concerns a widespread stereotype about innovation. In his later years, Malcom McLean, the former trucker whose audacious scheme to create the first containership line is re counted in chapter 3, was frequently asked how he came up with the idea of the container. He responded with a tale about how, after spending hours
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own as, decades later, well-meaning people asked McLean where the container came from. As I show in chapter 2, ship lines and railroads had been experimenting with containers for half a century before Malcom McLean’s trip to Jersey City, and containers were already in wide use in North America and Europe when McLean
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’s first ship set sail in 1956. Malcom McLean’s real contribution to the development of containerization, in my
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of shaving a few dollars off the cost of sending Malcom McLean’s trucks between New York and North Carolina. At best, it was regarded as a minor innovation, “an expedient,” as one leading naval architect opined in 1958. Perhaps, the experts thought, containers might capture a small share of America’s declining
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to build with the government guarantees, but plans for the trailerships were pushed to the side and finally abandoned.24 The concept that became container shipping was Malcom McLean’s. But in early 1955, when McLean jettisoned his plan to put entire truck trailers on Pan-Atlantic’s ships and decided instead to
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, where Malcom and Jim McLean, Kempton, and Egger were jumping up and down on the roof of a container. Tantlinger had told Malcom McLean that the wafer-thin aluminum roof was strong enough to keep the container rigid, and the McLean group was trying, unsuccessfully, to disprove his claim. Sold on the merits of
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1957, leaving McLean in control of both Pan-Atlantic and Waterman, and, more important, of Waterman’s large fleet.30 Malcom McLean was by no means the “inventor” of the shipping container. Metal cargo boxes of various shapes and sizes had been in use for decades, and numerous reports and studies supported the
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early as 1929, lifting the boxcars on and off with large dockside cranes. These ample precedents have led historians to downplay the nature of Malcom McLean’s achievements. His container was just a “new adaptation of a long-used transportation formula whose birth dates to the early years of the twentieth century,” French
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, these critics are correct. The high cost of freight handling was widely recognized as a critical problem in the early 1950s, and containers were much discussed as a potential solution. Malcom McLean was not writing on a blank slate. Yet the historians’ debate about precedence misses the transformational nature of McLean’s accomplishment
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. While many companies had tried putting freight into containers, those early containers did not fundamentally alter the economics of shipping and had no wider consequences. Malcom McLean’s fundamental insight, commonplace today but quite radical in the 1950s, was that the shipping industry’s
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the years when they were creating the container shipping industry as the best time of their lives. “It was a hard-charging, fast-charging company. Malcom would give us assignments and we didn’t ask questions, we just went out and did ‘em,” one said. Malcom McLean—universally called Malcom behind his back
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of vessel planners to pore over sheets listing the weight and destination of each container as they figured out the best way to load each ship. Computers would not begin to take on that job until 1965.36 Malcom McLean could no longer be involved in every decision. Yet his basic approach to
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not think the Governor should come out publicly and say the Port of New York Authority should run them.”22 The container was not yet reality in 1955, and given Malcom McLean’s status as a shipping-industry outsider, his plans had so far drawn little attention. With Mayor Wagner committed to keeping
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wharf area with dredged spoil, and then allowing the fill to settle. Wharves and roadways did not get under construction until 1961, by which time Malcom McLean’s container concepts were even further developed. As eventually built, Port Elizabeth’s first berths each had about eighteen acres of paved area alongside, to cut
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. Port Newark, like all parts of New York harbor, operated under ILA contracts. Gleason knew Malcom McLean—the ILA had organized some McLean Trucking warehouse workers in 1939—and the union agreed to handle Pan-Atlantic’s containers when the Ideal-X first set sail in 1956. Some union leaders made clear their
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thought: since the Sea-Land corner fitting was working smoothly with the world’s largest fleet of containers, perhaps the company would be willing to release its patent rights. Tantlinger made an appointment with Malcom McLean. McLean had no reason to be fond of the American Standards Association, which only recently had excluded
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in service to the Far East, and would increase costs for trucks picking up and delivering containers as well. Malcom McLean followed, armed with a consultant’s study showing that switching from 35- to 40-foot containers in Sea-Land’s Puerto Rico service would reduce revenues by 7 percent and costs hardly at
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loved the smells of the ocean and fondly referred to their ships as “she,” Malcom McLean’s wholly unromantic interest in moving freight in boxes had little appeal. It was all well and good for visionaries to proclaim that containers were a “must,” but the collective wisdom of the shipping industry held that
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to Europe. The U.S. Army, supporting hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe, began trials sending 40-foot containers across the ocean.20 These first international efforts were small in scale. Malcom McLean wanted to sail to Europe in 1961, and his staff dissuaded him: the company was not ready for such
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future trends in cargo handling were extremely high.23 No one was more aware that the world was about to change than Malcom McLean. He was already fully committed to the container. Outracing any potential competitors, Sea-Land had converted seven vessels into containerships between 1961 and 1963. The converted ships allowed it
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with similar hostility, because the rate for transporting the containers between Chicago and New Jersey was far below the standard per-ton rate for carrying canned goods. “It is extremely important that we defeat the proposal,” a New York Central executive wrote.37 Malcom McLean had a different vision. For him, railroads, trucks
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scuttled. The railroads made the minimum counteroffer that the ICC would allow: they would carry Sea-Land’s container cars—mixed in with other cars on their regular slow freights.39 Once again, Malcom McLean was ahead of his time—but with the railroads, he lacked the power to turn his vision into
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, however, knew that the commercial world had moved far beyond small containers and wooden pallets. Leading shipping executives were invited to Washington, where they were shown film clips of sailors lowering cargo nets by rope and asked for advice. When Malcom McLean saw the film, a colleague recalled, “[h]e got obsessed with
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full benefits of containerization can only be derived from logistic systems designed with full use of containers in mind.” It was a conclusion that shippers in the private sector were only beginning to reach.25 Malcom McLean’s persistence in pushing containerization was vital to the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. Without
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and were high enough that in March 1968 the U.S. command revoked permission to retrograde freight via container because, it was explained delicately, Sea-Land’s charges were “not rate-favorable.”29 Malcom McLean was not one to pass up an opportunity for profit. Now, an obvious one awaited. He had six
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signed leases for container berths in Oakland. In March 1968, the same month that army officers in Vietnam were ordered not to ship cargo back to the States via Sea-Land, Sea-Land announced that it would provide weekly sailings from Japan. Like almost everything else connected with Malcom McLean, Sea-Land’s
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containerships, a scheme utterly beyond the capability of any other port in the world. Less publicized, but even more ominous, were the changes in Malcom McLean’s container service. McLean had gone to great trouble to secure rights to serve ports from Boston to Galveston, and the fully containerized ships Pan-Atlantic introduced
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the flow of trade.45 Chapter 11 Boom and Bust On January 10, 1969, the maritime world was shaken by an unexpected piece of news. Malcom McLean, the father of container shipping, was selling out. Once again, his timing was impeccable. Three years earlier, at the start of 1966
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last. Ship lines had no reason to care what was inside the containers they carried, and with rampant excess capacity they were willing to accept any payment that exceeded their cost to carry the container. By early 1967, Waterman Steamship, Malcom McLean’s former company, switched to a flat rate for shipments from the
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only way out. In July 1969, barely three years after container shipping had become an international business, West Germany’s two biggest shipping companies agreed to merge as Hapag-Lloyd, a huge new player in the North Atlantic. Three months later, Malcom McLean responded in kind. McLean had always preferred consolidation to competition
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in standardized 20-foot equivalent units, or TEUs. A 40-foot container represents 2 TEUs, and one of Matson’s 24-foot boxes registered as 1.2 TEUs. Chapter 12 The Bigness Complex Malcom McLean sold his stock and quietly left the board of R. J. Reynolds Industries in February 1977. By all
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still handled by breakbulk ships. Containers were by no means universal; on many less trafficked routes, especially to Africa and Latin America, traditional ships still dominated. In commercial terms, though, these were niche markets, not large opportunities. The major ocean routes had become the floating highways that Malcom McLean had envisioned. Seventeen ships
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for many, it was far from a catastrophe for the industry Malcom McLean had created. By 1986, the year of U.S. Lines’ collapse, ports, transportation companies, and shippers around the world had invested $76 billion in order to carry freight in containers. Another $130 billion of outlays was forecast by the end
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; after insurers were persuaded that container shipping in fact had fewer property losses, premiums fell by up to 30 percent. Faster ships and reductions in the time needed to load and unload vessels at ports resulted in lower costs for inventory in shipment.21 As Malcom McLean had understood back in 1955, it
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a poster child for the inefficiency caused by outdated regulation. The basic concept of the container was that cargo could move seamlessly among trains, trucks, and ships. Two decades after Malcom McLean’s first containership, though, container shipping was anything but seamless. In principle, a truck line or a railroad could offer an exporter
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their investment would not go to waste. Equipment manufacturers went back to work on low-slung railcars designed for fast loading of containers stacked two-high, the sort of cars Malcom McLean had tried—and failed—to convince railroads to use back in 1967. Deregulation meant that those doublestack cars could be used
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chain.1 Supply chains like Barbie’s are a direct result of the changes wrought by the rise of container shipping. They were unheard-of back in 1956, when Malcom McLean placed his first containers on board the Ideal-X, and in 1976, when high oil prices brought sky-high freight costs that stifled
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dynamic force that almost nothing it touched was left unchanged, and those changes often were not as predicted. TABLE 6 The World’s Largest Containerports: Containers Handled (Million 20-Foot Equivalents) Malcom McLean’s genius was acknowledged unanimously: almost everyone save the dockworkers’ unions thought that putting freight into
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-sixth of the world market by absorbing companies as diverse as Britain’s Overseas Containers Ltd., South African Marine, the Dutch shipping giant Nedlloyd, and Malcom McLean’s old company, Sea-Land Service. If the market repeatedly misjudged the container, so did the state. Governments in New York City and San Francisco ignored the
How the World Ran Out of Everything
by Peter S. Goodman · 11 Jun 2024 · 528pp · 127,605 words
was no Just in Time. The whole system of moving goods around the planet revolved around the container. All of that had come to pass because of the innovation of a man named Malcom McLean. McLean was not trying to change the world. He was just looking for a way to avoid
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availability of container vessels to construct Just in Time supply chains spanning oceans, while treating transportation as a trifling cost. From Europe to the United States, consumers reaped the gains via inexpensive imports. Zara, H&M, Uniqlo: all benefited from monumental scale and cheap shipping rates. But somewhere between Malcom McLean’s Ideal
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Yes, Rooney replied. It couldn’t hurt. The following week, Maffei arrived at the Port of Newark. Nearly seven decades had passed since Malcom McLean embarked on his maiden container voyage from these very shores. The terminals clustered on the land had become a linchpin of the global supply chain. Tractor-trailers rumbled
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them to insignificance. The container had been a major advance in this battle, delivering a monumental leap in efficiency and sharply reducing the need for longshore workers. But that was not the end of the story. Robots were poised to finish the job. Three years after Malcom McLean’s first voyage out of
The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown · 12 Apr 2010 · 319pp · 89,477 words
, CEOs, best-selling recording artists. But in truth they’re for everyone. In fact, one of our examples, Malcom McLean, who changed the way the world shipped everything with the introduction of the shipping container in 1946, started off driving a truck for someone else. It is no accident that these early examples
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As we will see in our final chapter, the power of pull can be used to reshape major markets and industries on a global scale. Malcom McLean, Victor and William Fung, Dee Hock, and Shai Agassi are just a few examples of individuals who have done this in such diverse arenas as
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delivery: software as a service. The Fung brothers revolutionized supply-chain practice in the apparel industry. Malcom McLean led Sea-Land to a preeminent position in the containerized shipping business by driving standardization around his innovative container designs. And Dee Hock helped Visa make an exemplary shaping move in the 1970s at a
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submitted, presented, and paid for, enabling participants to generate value from the platform with minimal investment of time and effort and minimal oversight from Google. Malcom McLean, the founder of Sea-Land and a successful shaper of the global shipping industry, employed a very different kind of shaping platform to provide interaction
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that successful shaping requires tight focus. Malcom McLean made a similar bold move in his effort to accelerate adoption of his shaping platform for the containerized shipping industry. He held valuable patents for his innovative design for four corner fittings and twist-lock mechanisms on shipping containers. In the 1960s he issued a
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currently work for any institution, large or small. The temptation is to think that there’s little you can do to change the world. But Malcom McLean, who transformed the way the world ships goods, started off driving a truck for someone else. Bill Gates was a college drop-out. But both
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories
by Simon Winchester · 27 Oct 2009 · 522pp · 150,592 words
and shipped them back to Tyre—was that taken in the mid-1950s, when an American trucking executive named Malcom McLean hit on the idea of packing cargoes into enormous steel boxes—shipping containers. Up until then, cargoes—whether they were bags of potatoes, bales of cotton, bottles of whisky, motorcars, or machine
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emblems of today’s globalized world, were ever invented. But Malcom McLean—who tried his first ship out in the Atlantic Ocean, in April 1956, running a converted U.S. Navy tanker, the Ideal-X, from Newark to Houston, with fifty-eight containers—knew that in the shipping industry time was everything and
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above them. The world-changing idea of placing marine cargoes into same-size steel boxes, and creating the so-called container ship, belongs unequivocally to a former truck driver from North Carolina, Malcom McLean. There are also some brand-new ideas. One that has gained some traction, literally, is to have an immense
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and Communication The Andrea Doria and Stockholm The sinking of the Torrey Canyon Aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown Air routes across the ocean Malcom McLean Rachel Carson Codfish Patagonian toothfish A NASA map of Arctic ice shrinking Cape Verde hurricane Prochlorococcus cyanobacterium Tristan da Cunha The end of the Atlantic
Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
by Nicola Twilley · 24 Jun 2024 · 428pp · 125,388 words
carry them than their standard, “dry” forty-foot counterparts. Unrefrigerated shipping containers made their commercial debut on a rainy Thursday in 1956, when Pratt was not yet two years old. These now-ubiquitous metal boxes were the brainchild of Malcom McLean, the forty-two-year-old son of a poor North Carolina farmer
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I also referenced the following: “Malcolm Purcell McLean, Pioneer of Container Ships, Died on May 25th, Aged 87,” Economist, May 31, 2001; Betty Joyce Nash, “The Voyage to Containerization,” Economic History, 2012, pp. 39–42; Brian J. Cudahy, “The Containership Revolution: Malcom McLean’s 1956 Innovation Goes Global,” TR News, no. 246 (September
The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin · 14 Sep 2020
largely unknown in China and indeed the rest of the world—an entrepreneur from a small North Carolina town once known as Shoe Heel. Yet Malcom McLean, otherwise known as “Idea-a-Minute” McLean, is one of the most consequential figures in the history of transportation. Starting off with a tiny trucking
Into the Raging Sea
by Rachel Slade · 4 Apr 2018 · 390pp · 109,438 words
resistance—containerization took a while to catch on. But you couldn’t fight progress for long. In the mid-’50s, North Carolina–based trucking tycoon Malcom McLean developed a complete containerization system, which he launched with a single experimental ship in 1957. A year later, his company inaugurated containerized service between
Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
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trucks driving on dirt roads for weeks, often in hostile territory. Desperate for better results, the U.S. Army hired Malcom McLean, the original innovator of container shipping, to build and operate a container port at Cam Ranh Bay. He had two conditions: each box would be packed with a single type of item
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey · 17 Jun 2019 · 626pp · 167,836 words
on transportation and trade more generally. In conjunction with the rise of the trucking industry, the container revolution was an engine of postwar growth. And containerization emerged directly from trucking. Malcom McLean, a trucking entrepreneur, invented the container as a mean of integrating the segmented industries of shipping, trucking, and railroads. The first successful
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez · 27 Jun 2016 · 559pp · 155,372 words
. —Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology FEBRUARY 28, 2013 Any idea who Malcom McLean was? I bet not. But that one man changed our economy more than practically anyone else in the twentieth century. McLean was the inventor of the intermodal container, those metal boxes piled into immense heaps on the cargo ships coming
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