The Quiet Spread of the Shipping Container

[A] Before the late 1950s, loading a ship was a craft. Cargo arrived at the dock as barrels, sacks, crates and loose bundles, and gangs of longshoremen fitted them into the hold piece by piece, the way one packs an overfull suitcase. [B] A ship could spend longer in port than at sea, and the cost of moving goods was dominated not by the ocean voyage but by the waiting.

[C] The container did not solve a technical problem so much as a coordination one. A steel box is simple; what was hard was persuading railways, truck makers, ports and shipping lines to agree on a single set of dimensions and corner fittings, so that the same box could be lifted from a lorry onto a train and then onto a ship anywhere in the world. [D] Agreement took most of a decade, and it required several companies to abandon designs they had already paid for. Once it was reached, the effect was abrupt. Port labour fell, ships grew, and factories began to be built far from the customers who would buy their output, because distance had stopped being expensive.