How shipping containers reshaped the global freight industry
Tankers were already quite common in the 1950s, but they had a significant problem: They weren’t really designed to carry lots of different kinds of things. If a tanker was moving oil between coasts, there wasn’t really room for anything other than oil.
This was inefficient for multiple reasons: For one thing, if you were delivering oil from one port to another, it’s not like the tanker was going to bring oil back with it—that’s not how oil works. That meant a return trip was a function of sheer location and was otherwise completely fruitless.
Compare this to trucking—when McLean’s crew delivered textiles up north, they often brought something back with them. What if you could apply this thinking to ships?
And so, that’s what McLean did with U.S. patent 2,853,968, “Apparatus for Shipping Freight.” The strategy was simple: Rather than having trucks deliver freight that could be placed on a ship to travel globally, you put the truck bed itself onto the ship. The tankers, many of which had been used in World War II, were large enough to hold dozens of them, and the scale meant the ships could carry literal tons of freight—per container.
Plus, containers are strong enough to make the transition in one piece, literally—and by treating them like building blocks, they become even stronger structurally. Per the patent filing:
The containers are of sturdy construction capable of withstanding the forces to be encountered on the open seas and are adapted to receive the freight to be trans ported. In a specific, and particularly advantageous, embodiment of my invention, hereafter more specifically described, each container may be of a construction adapted to receive a complete truck-trailer fully loaded with freight.
The construction is such that two rows of containers are formed. Preferably, the containers of one row are in side by side relation with each other and in end to end relation with the adjacent containers of the other row. Thus, the long sides of the containers are protected from direct impact from high seas by adjoining containers and in the case of the four end containers their outer sides are protected by the forecastle or poop deck structure as the case may be.
There are lots of other advantages, too: It didn’t require significant redesigns of existing ships, and by placing the containers atop the ship, it could suddenly make single-purpose ships multifunctional. Plus, it prevented containers from getting lost—like the items on a plate destined for a picky eater, everything’s kept separate.