Each day, 55 million tons of cargo flow across the country — toasters, laptops, pillow cases, canned fruit. With all those tools, goodies, and gadgets, it is easy to overlook the thing that holds those other, more exciting things. Compared to flashier technological revolutions, like phones or power plants, containers seem mundane. Even the word “container” emphasizes the stuff inside of it. It’s surprising, then, the colossal impact such a boring box had on everything from the power of unions to drug smuggling to Bangladesh’s textile industry.

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During the industrial revolution, transportation technology leaped forward, with trains and canals cutting voyage times to a third and costs to a tenth. However, at ports, progress was nonexistent. Sure, forklifts and cranes started appearing in the early 1900s, but these weren’t used on the majority of goods. The underlying system was the same in 1950 as a millennium earlier - hundreds of men lugging barrels and sacks around a port. Ships spent several weeks (half of their total voyage) sitting at docks, waiting to be fully unloaded, accounting for as much as half of the total shipping cost. 

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One inefficiency was the huge number of discrete items aboard ships, often numbering in the hundreds of thousands, all jumbled together in the cargo hold, with sharp metal coils squeezing against bags of sugar and kegs of whiskey. When the ship docked, a crew of longshoremen would haul off each individual item, set it down on the dock, then load it all onto trucks. These trucks would be unloaded again at a storage facility where the cargo would sit until it was at last moved to its final destination.

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Adding the chaos of ports were the dock worker organizations. Longshoremen experienced a high injury and fatality rate, either from lifting heavy objects or falling off high places. Theft was a big problem, too. Everything from bottles of liquor to transistor radios to “sixty-kilo burlap bags of coffee beans” were at risk. Longshoremen also frequently went on strike, with “an 11-nation study [finding] that dockworkers, along with miners and seafarers, lost more workdays to labor disputes than any other professions.”

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With ports being so obviously inadequate and containers being such a simple idea, it is perhaps surprising that it took until the 1960s for them to become popular. There were a few early attempts at containerization, but most were blocked by the government or unions. When one rail line came up with the idea of transferable containers, the Interstate Commerce Commission insisted the entire container be taxed at the rate of the most expensive thing inside. Longshoremen unions also fiercely opposed any attempt to lessen the manpower required at ports. For example, in 1954, a few shipping companies tried sending their products pre-tied to wooden pallets, cutting the number of men needed per hatch (a typical ship has 5 hatches) from 22 to 16. In response, unions ordered longshoremen to remove each item from the pallet when it came on a truck, haul it onto the ship, then re-tie the cargo back onto the pallets, actually increasing the required labor. Other ideas, like having hatches on the side of ships instead of the top, making depositing goods much easier, met similar fates. And when shipping containers first entered the scene, dockworkers went on strike or insisted on “stripping-and-stuffing” (unpacking and reloading). To overcome those challenges, it would take a certain type of person, someone inventive, aggressive, and willing to take a loss. 

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Malcolm McLean was just that person. After realizing the potential of intermodal shipping, he bought decommissioned WW2 vessels and quickly threw together designs with an engineer. On April 26, 1956, the Ideal X, the first boat carrying intermodal containers, finally set sail from Newark to Houston. When it docked, the cranes on board methodically lifted and moved containers onto land, careful not to capsize the ship by making the weight too unbalanced. They unloaded a box weighing several tons every seven minutes, about the same time it takes a stevedore to haul a single crate to shore, depositing them directly onto trucks, which then zipped off along their routes. When McLean finally tallied the prices, the cost of loading and unloading plummeted from $5.83 per ton to $0.158.

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Our ports now are completely unrecognizable from the ones humans have been using for the past 2 millennia. Today, large container ships carry between 10,000 and 24,000 containers, 8 times more than the largest from 1970 and 2 times the average from 20 years ago. A typical ship with 20,000 containers, equivalent to a 40-mile long train, that holds 220,000 tons of goods (100 times the amount a ship from 1900) can be unloaded in just one day. While there are still inefficiencies with containers (“20.5% of global port handling” shuttling empty containers back), they remain one of those rare inventions that makes the industry it is in unrecognizable.

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The impact of containers stretches far beyond the shipping industry, though. With the price of shipping now practically negligible in the price of goods, countries can specialize in what they are best at and companies can outsource their factories to where labor is cheapest. Developing countries in Asia rapidly industrialized as factories and sweatshops became a major source of employment. Now that American workers were competing with workers in Indonesia or Bangladesh, unions lost a lot of their bargaining power - any call for higher wages or better conditions might be the final push a company needs to move overseas. Similar to industries being able to operate abroad, containers allowed the US military to “sustain a well-fed and well-equipped force through years of combat in places that would have otherwise been beyond the reach of U.S. military might.” Without containers, there may have been whole wars that, for better or worse, the United States couldn’t have fought, at least at the same scale.

By allowing specialization, containers have contributed to unprecedented levels of interdependence among countries. Now, a drought in Russia causes food shortages and political unrest in Egypt; a push for clean energy in China means job loss in Indonesia. The problems and politics of a country no longer stay within its borders. The dozens of others that rely on their exports, whether material, financial, intellectual, or cultural, have skin in the game. Containers have brought a vision of a global economy one step closer to fruition. Whether this creates net good or bad is hard to say. What is certain is that containers have shrunk the world in ways that we can’t easily go back from.