Most people don’t understand or recognize the significance of the humble shipping container. Before shipping containers, all goods were manually loaded into sacks, barrels and wooden crates loaded directly onto cargo vessels – known as break-bulk shipping. It could take up to 3 weeks to unload and load each ship. Today’s massive container ships can be unloaded and loaded within 24 hours, thanks to the advent of the shipping container.
When was the shipping container invented?
The intermodal shipping container was invented back in 1956 by an American entrepreneur Malcom McLean and has since revolutionized shipping industry and global trade. For years Malcolm wondered how he could get his trucking company’s entire cargo loaded onto a shipping vessel as quickly and efficiently as possible. He began working with engineer Keith Tantlinger to build the world’s first shipping container. It was an incredible invention that eliminated wasted space and cut unloading time by up to 3 weeks. The most significant change is that the shipping container allowed cargo to be seamlessly transported between road, rail and sea. This moment in the history of the shipping container marked a new era in how goods are transported worldwide.
The world’s first container ship, a converted World War 2 tanker ‘Ideal X’ sailed from the port of Newark to the port of Houston in 1956. It carried 58 shipping containers. In 1968 the International Standards Organisation standardised this invention as a standard box. The box was identified as being 20 foot long, 8 foot high and 8 foot wide. From then on ships were then completely re-designed around the dimensions of boxes! The cost of shipping reduced and it now became cheaper to manufacture goods on the other side of the world because shipping became so cheap. Since then it has revolutionised ports, rail networks, ships, cities, and countries all over the world, making containerization a standardization in the shipping industry. The shipping container has been the single biggest catalyst of globalization.
According to the Economist, “the shipping container has been more of a driver of globalization than all trade agreements in the past 50 years together.”
Today’s modern shipping vessels can carry over 20,000 TEU shipping containers (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units). There are currently 20 million shipping containers ‘on the water’ travelling between countries all over the world. Most people don’t know it or appreciate it, but today over 90% of purchased items have been transported inside a shipping container.