HISTORY OF CONTAINERIZATION

Modern container shipping had been use over 57 years until now. Almost from the first voyage, use of this method of transport for goods grew steadily and in just five decades, containerships would carry about 60% of the value of goods shipped via sea.

The idea of using some type of shipping container was not completely novel. 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. 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 "intermodalism", 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 50 years.

The Containership

On 26 April 1956, Malcom McLean's converted World War II tanker, the Ideal X, made its maiden voyage from Port Newark to Houston in the USA. It had a reinforced deck carrying 58 metal container boxes as well as 15,000 tons of bulk petroleum. By the time the container ship docked at the Port of Houston six days later the company was already taking orders to ship goods back to Port Newark in containers. McLean's enterprise later became known as Sea-Land Services, a company whose ships carried cargo-laden truck trailers between Northern and Southern ports in the USA.

Other companies soon turned to this approach. Two years later, Matson Navigation Company's shipHawaiian Merchant began container shipping in the Pacific, carrying 20 containers from Alameda to Honolulu. In 1960, Matson Navigation Company completed construction of the Hawaiian Citizen, the Pacific's first full container ship. Meanwhile, the first ship specifically designed for transporting containers, Sea-Land's Gateway City, made its maiden voyage on 4 October 1957 from Port Newark to Miami, starting a regular journey between Port Newark, Miami, Houston and Tampa. It required only two gangs of dockworkers to load and unload, and could move cargo at the rate of 264 tons an hour. Shortly afterwards, the Santa Eliana, operated by Grace Line, became the first fully containerized ship to enter foreign trade when she set sail for Venezuela in January 1960.

The Container

It was a logical next step that container sizes could be standardized so that they could be most efficiently stacked and so that ships, trains, trucks and cranes at the port could be specially fitted or built to a single size specification. This standardization would eventually apply across the global industry.

As early as 1960, international groups already recognizing the potential of container shipping began discussing what the standard container sizes should be. In 1961, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) set standard sizes. The two most important, and most commonly used sizes even today, are the 20-foot and 40-foot lengths. The 20-foot container, referred to as a Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) became the industry standard reference with cargo volume and vessel capacity now measured in TEUs. The 40-foot length container - literally 2 TEUs - became known as the Forty-foot Equivalent Unit (FEU) and is the most frequently used container today.