Before Silicon Valley revolutionized communications, one man from North Carolina revolutionized everything else. His name was Malcolm McLean, and he didn’t build a computer, a car, or any kind of machine. He recognized how a big metal box might radically increase the ease of shipping things, and this made our world possible.
—The Editors
Few innovations define modern life as much as the humble shipping container. Back in the 1950s, pre-container, the United States’ largest import was coffee beans. A shopper couldn’t run to the store and find merchandise from all over the world. Businesses obtained almost all their supplies and components, other than raw materials, locally. Most of what crossed the seas were commodities. Imports and exports were very small relative to the size of the U.S. economy, mainly because loading goods aboard ship and transporting them across the oceans often added more than 20 percent to their cost. Most of that cost was incurred on the docks, where dozens of dockworkers could require a week or more to load hundreds of thousands of separate items aboard an outbound vessel.
The container changed this. By making it possible to transfer freight almost seamlessly between trucks, trains, ships, and barges, the container revolutionized cargo transportation. Starting in the late 1960s, when it first came into international use, this simple steel box paved the way for explosive growth in foreign trade as goods could be shipped around the globe at remarkably little cost. Vast factory complexes in which manufacturers formed raw materials into components and components into finished products gradually yielded to complex supply chains linking specialized factories located far apart. Go into any American store and you’ll be confronted by a host of goods produced in every corner of the globe.
