Because of the ubiquity
of shipping containers, we take them for granted in today’s society. But you
only need to go back 60 years and we had no shipping containers- no intermodal
transport systems.
How is it that the world
knows the name Henry Ford yet not Malcom McLean? Today we are going to look at
the history of shipping containers- what we used before them, how and who
invented them and finally, the impact they have had on globalisation and the
world as we know it today.
For centuries mankind has
voyaged across the seas taking not only themselves but food, cotton, treasure
and goods, the likes of which their own country had never seen before. Just
think of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and more recently the British!
How did they transport
their goods around the world? Well they clearly shipped them, but without any
standardisation it was a slow and difficult process.
Goods would be stored at
a port warehouse until a boat was available. When an empty vessel arrived these
goods would be transported from the warehouse to the side of the docked ship.
Goods would typically be loaded into sacks, bales, crates and barrels, and then
they would be loaded by hand onto the ship. As you can imagine this would be a
very labour intensive process. This process was known as break bulk cargo, and
a typical ship would have around 200,000 pieces of cargo on-board.
Towards the later part of the second industrial revolution
(early 1900’s), this lack of standardisation was becoming a real issue,
especially considering how prevalent trains had now become. Transferring cargo
from ships to trains was extremely slow and caused major delays and blockages
within many ports. Larger ships would take around a week to unload then re-load
(Levinson, 2006: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the
World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger).
This was the only way to
transport goods and for centuries this process remained unchanged.
There was a great need
for a standardised method of transport but for this to be realised a whole host
of industries needed aligning, such as: ships, trains, trucks and port
terminals. As you can imagine, it would require a lot of work and persuasion to
make such a feat possible.
This is where you find
out exactly who Malcom McLean is.
Malcom McLean was born in
1914 and grew up on a farm in North Carolina. After finishing school in 1931,
he worked for several years to save up enough money to purchase a second-hand
truck, and in 1934 he launched his transport business. McLean soon scaled up
his transport business and had five trucks running underneath him.
During a routine delivery
of cotton bales in 1937 from North Carolina to New Jersey, McLean witnessed
stevedores loading and unloading cargo, which took hours on hours, and he
contemplated on what a waste of time and money this was.
It was during this time
period that several weight restrictions and levying fees were introduced to
road transportation. It was not uncommon for McLean’s drivers to be fined for
heavy loads of cargo.
McLean was now looking
for a more efficient way to transport his clients’ cargo and was reminded of
his experience in New Jersey back in 1937. It was now when he had the idea of
creating a standard sized trailer which could be loaded onto boats in the
volume of not one or two, like with his trucks, but in hundreds. He envisaged
revolutionising his transportation business by removing most of his trucks and
using boats to transport the goods to ‘strategically’ place trucking hubs.
This would mean that
trucks would only be used for short, intrastate, deliveries. Hence eliminating
the weight restrictions and levying fees which had only recently been
introduced. So if you are looking for shipping services visit Allindiayellowpage.com to get details
about shipping container services in your city.