The history of the shipping container. A surprisingly interesting topic.
I picked up the book because of recent stories about supply-chain issues.
There’s also an interesting overlap with military logistics. The American military started using containers in the Vietnam war. In the Russia/Ukraine war, a lot of the reporting I see comes down to the military supply-chains on both sides. Apparently, Russian internal infrastructure does no use containers even in non-military applications!
The book dates the start of the use of shipping containers to 1956 by Malcom McLean. McLean was a key player in the industry until his passing in 2001.
Prior to containers, ‘breakbulk’ cargo was the norm. The book describes how ships were loaded and unloaded on the docks by large teams of longshoremen. The work was largely manual and backbreaking. Boxes and sacks were loaded on pallets, hoisted by cranes onto the ship, and then the items were taken from the pallets and packed into the holds of the ship. A longshoreman had to know how to balance the load, how to fit items into the hold to make optimal use of the space, how and when to tie-down the load so it didn’t shift at sea, etc. It was a skilled profession.
Surprisingly, there was massive government regulations surrounding the shipping business, both on the seas, as well as on land (railroads and trucking both). Furthermore, there was a lot of collusion between the shipping companies to agree on standard rates for ocean shipping. Anti-trust?
I also found parallels with the growth of the computer industry and the growth of the Internet. Lots of scrambling by innovators, serial bankruptcies, competing standards, wild business successes and failures, and standardization and commoditization as a final outcomes.
All this happened in my lifetime, so it is interesting to correlate these historical events with happenings in my life. E.g., I attended university in the Vietnam era. I knew a couple of draft-dodgers (in Canada) and had friends who had been in the army in Vietnam (at MIT in Boston).
A good read. Highly recommended.