EDMONTON — It’s hard to remember when shipping containers were not the way most goods were shipped.
Before containers, everything travelled in the hold of a ship and had to be carried out of the ship and into trucks, trains or warehouses, said Marc Levinson, author of The Box, a history of the shipping container.
“Shipping before containers was a very labour intensive process,” Levinson said during the FarmTech conference.
Ships sat at the side of a dock for two to three weeks while they were loaded or unloaded; 50,000 dock workers lived in New York City in the 1950s.
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“Millions of people made a living lifting boxes and barrels.”
The labour-intensive process also meant a lot of goods weren’t shipped because it was simply too expensive.
Shipping companies tried a variety of ways to make the process more efficient, but containers didn’t take off until they became a standard 40 foot size with locking systems that would work on trucks, trains or boats.
“That was what made it possible to load a container anywhere in the world,” said Levinson. “It really opened the door to global industry. Containers really made freight cheap.”
Container freight began crossing the oceans in the 1960s but didn’t become common until the Americans built a container port in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Tired of shipping back empty containers, Malcom McLean, an American container pioneer, began filling them with Japanese textiles and electronics in 1968.
Much of the American transportation industry was deregulated by the 1970s, and freight costs were cut in half.
“This is what made the business take off. Now large companies could sign contracts with the railroads,” he said. “The sloppy service for which the railroads were famous now had to be cleaned up.”
The agriculture industry started shipping agricultural products in containers to take advantage of a trade imbalance between Asia and North America.
“That made shipping agriculture products practical,” Levinson said.
“It gave rise to new opportunities for farmers that no one thought about.”
Levinson doesn’t know if the container business has become too successful. Long lines of trucks wait at ports to unload container ships. The largest container ship now holds 9,000, 40 foot containers.
“Ports are congested and the problem is getting worse, not better.”
All containers need to be removed from the ship to port and then put on truck or train before new containers are moved onto the ship within hours of ship docking.
“Port operations are under pressure to get ships turned around quickly.”
mary.macarthur@producer.com
