Every industry has its base unit, the quantity by which growth and decline are measured. In shipping, that unit is the 20-foot (six-meter) container, roughly the size of the tiniest of tiny homes. In the 21st century, it is the conduit for much of the material goods that furnish our lives.<\/p>\n
Consumers in North America and Europe, ravenous for the newest products, import more than they export. Global trade has boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with stores rushing to restock panic-stripped shelves and housebound shoppers moving online. The demand\u2014and a behemoth traffic jam in the Suez Canal\u2014has sparked container shortages, while some ports can scarcely manage the incoming shipments. In Oakland and Los Angeles, California, full containers have piled up in parking lots and on residential streets. Once unloaded, the boxes are quickly shipped back to China for more cargo. \u201cThe lead export of [the twin ports of] Long Beach-Los Angeles is fresh air\u2014that is, empty containers,\u201d says Jean-Paul Rodrigue<\/a>, a transportation geographer at Hofstra University in New York.<\/p>\n Two years of snafus has brought shipping into the public eye, but for people who live in port cities around the world, the looming vessels anchored offshore are already a familiar sight.<\/p>\n A horizon dotted with container ships, however, is fairly recent in shipping\u2019s long history. Containers\u2014affectionately dubbed \u201csea cans\u201d\u2014emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a way of transporting goods between coastal cities in the United States and to Alaska, Hawai\u2018i, and Puerto Rico. Malcolm P. McLean, a North Carolina truck driver turned trucking magnate, had grown tired of waiting for dockworkers to unpack deliveries. He calculated that moving giant boxes of goods directly from trucks to transport ships would cut costs and<\/em> congestion at ports.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore containerization, ships had to be loaded and unloaded by hand, especially cargo\u2014crates of shoes, alcohol, cigarettes,\u201d says Rodrigue. The process was like packing and unpacking a house: time-consuming and dangerous for the most precious goods. Shipping companies, which also faced organized crime and rampant theft on the docks, adopted sea cans to improve bottom lines. In 1956, the going rate for shipping a tonne of cargo domestically was US $6.43. But with containers, McLean cut the cost to just $0.18 per tonne. Their use quickly spread to countries that traded with the United States.<\/p>\n In the spring of 1966, McLean, a newly minted shipping baron, sent the first specialized container ship across the Atlantic from New York to Rotterdam, Netherlands. After winning a contract to ship US military supplies to Vietnam for the war, McLean\u2019s Sea-Land company constructed container ports in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and Da Nang. Ever a shrewd businessman, McLean then forged a deal with a Japanese electronics company to fill his empty ships in Yokohama, Japan, with televisions and stereos for the North American market.<\/p>\n By 1970, ports in Europe, Australia, and Asia were handling the now-ubiquitous steel boxes, though major US container terminals still dominated global traffic.<\/p>\n\r\n\t