This year modern container shipping celebrated its 64th anniversary. Almost from the first voyage, use of this method of transport for goods grew steadily and in just six decades, containerships would carry about 70% of the value of goods shipped by sea.
The idea of using some type of shipping container was not completely new to us. Boxes similar to modern containers had been used for combined rail- and horse-drawn transport in England as early as 1792. The US government used small standard-sized containers during the Second World War, which proved a means of quickly and efficiently unloading and distributing supplies. They were called conex boxes.
However, in 1955, Malcom P. McLean, a trucking entrepreneur from North Carolina, USA, bought a steamship company with the idea of transporting entire truck trailers with their cargo still inside. He realized it would be much simpler and quicker to have one container that could be lifted from a vehicle directly on to a ship without first having to unload its contents.
His ideas were based on the theory that efficiency could be vastly improved through a system of intermodal units, in which the same container, with the same cargo, can be transported with minimum interruption via different transport modes during its journey. Containers could be moved seamlessly between ships, trucks and trains. This would simplify the whole logistical process and, eventually, implementing this idea led to a revolution in cargo transportation and international trade over the next 60 years.
