Listening Part 4: The box that changed the world

Lecturer: Today I want to talk about an invention so simple that most people never think about it: the shipping container. It's just a steel box. But it reshaped the global economy in the second half of the twentieth century.

Lecturer: Before containers, cargo was transported as what's called break-bulk. Sacks, barrels and crates were loaded onto ships piece by piece by teams of dockworkers. A ship could easily spend a week or more in port being loaded and unloaded.

Lecturer: This was slow and expensive, and theft was common, because goods passed through so many hands.

Lecturer: The person usually credited with changing this is Malcolm McLean, an American who ran a trucking company. His insight was that you shouldn't move the goods at all. You should move the box they're packed in, from truck to ship to truck, without opening it.

Lecturer: In April 1956, a converted oil tanker called the Ideal X sailed from Newark, near New York, to Houston, carrying fifty-eight containers.

Lecturer: McLean later estimated that loading loose cargo had cost almost six dollars a ton, whereas loading his containers cost around sixteen cents a ton. A dramatic difference.

Lecturer: But the container didn't take over immediately. Different companies used boxes of different sizes, which meant a container from one company wouldn't fit another's ships or cranes.

Lecturer: The real turning point was standardisation. In the late 1960s, international standards were agreed for container sizes. Twenty and forty feet long became the norm, and capacity is still measured in "twenty-foot equivalent units".

Lecturer: The consequences were enormous. First, for workers. Jobs on the docks fell dramatically, because one crane operator could now do work that had needed dozens of people.

Lecturer: Second, for cities. Old ports in city centres often lacked the space and the deep water that container ships needed. So activity moved to new terminals. In Britain, the London docks declined, while Felixstowe on the east coast grew into the country's busiest container port.

Lecturer: And third, for manufacturing. Because transport became so cheap and reliable, companies could make different parts of a product in different countries and assemble them somewhere else. In other words, the container made modern global supply chains possible.

Lecturer: So, a steel box. In next week's session, we'll look at the environmental cost of all this shipping.