Container ship

The container ship emerged because a North Carolina truck driver with no shipping experience asked why cargo had to be touched by human hands so many times between origin and destination—and transformed global trade to answer his own question.

Malcom McLean was born in the cotton town of Maxton, North Carolina in 1913. He bought a used truck in 1934 and built McLean Trucking into one of America's largest trucking companies. But he kept noticing inefficiency: every time cargo moved between truck and ship, workers unloaded boxes by hand, stored them temporarily, then loaded them onto the next vessel. Why not just move the entire truck container?

In 1955, McLean sold his 75 percent stake in McLean Trucking for $6 million and bet everything on a different idea. He bought Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company and converted a World War II tanker, the Potrero Hills, into a vessel that could carry standardized metal containers. Rechristened the Ideal X, she sailed from Port Newark, New Jersey to Houston on April 26, 1956, carrying 58 thirty-five-foot containers and 15,000 tons of petroleum.

The economics were staggering. Hand-loading a ship cost $5.86 per ton. Container loading cost 16 cents per ton—a 36-fold reduction. But cost was only part of the revolution. Containers eliminated three weeks of loading and unloading time. Cargo theft dropped dramatically—sealed containers couldn't be pilfered like individual crates. Goods moved seamlessly between ships, trains, and trucks without repacking.

McLean renamed his company Sea-Land Industries and expanded relentlessly. In 1963, he opened a 101-acre container port at Newark. In 1966, Sea-Land began transatlantic service to Rotterdam, Bremen, and Grangemouth. By the end of the 1960s, Sea-Land operated 36 container ships accessing more than 30 ports with 27,000 containers.

The Kooringa, launched in 1964 from Newcastle, Australia's State Dockyard, was among the first purpose-built cellular container ships, designed from the keel up for containerized cargo. But McLean's converted tankers had already proven the concept.

McLean died in 2001. The Baltimore Sun wrote that 'he ranks next to Robert Fulton as the greatest revolutionary in the history of maritime trade.' Forbes called him 'one of the few men who changed the world.' The industry he founded with 58 containers now moves millions daily—the infrastructure of globalization built by a man who started with one used truck.