Ocean Container Shipping: Impacts of a Technological Improvement

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Through the 1950s, ocean transport of general (dry non-bulk) cargo used break-bulk (i.e., on pallet) methods: pallets were moved, generally one at a time, onto a truck or rail car that carried them from the factory or warehouse to the docks. There each pallet was unloaded and hoisted, by cargo net and crane, off the dock and onto the ship. Once the pallet was in the ship's hole, it had to be positioned precisely and braced to protect it from damage during the ocean crossing. This process was then reversed at the other end of the voyage, making the ocean transport of general cargo a slow, labor-intensive, and expensive process. All of this began to change in 1955. Malcolm McLean, believing that individual pieces of cargo needed to be handled only twice-at their origin when stored in a standardized container box and at their destination when unloaded-purchased a small tanker company, renamed it Sea-Land, and adapted its ships to transport truck trailers. The first voyage, to Puerto Rico, of a Sea-Land containership began in Newark, New Jersey, USA, April 26, 1956. Confrontations with shipping lines, railroads, and unions, however, delayed the company's maiden international voyage to Rotterdam until 1966. The containerization of international trade had begun. In the years that followed, standardized containers were constructed, generally twenty or forty feet long without wheels, having locking mechanisms at each corner that could be secured to a truck chassis, a rail car, a crane, or other containers inside a ship's hole or on its deck. The use of standardized containers also meant that intermodalism of international trade, the movement of cargo from an origin in one