The Shipping Container
1954 – 202671 items
maritimetradeThe box that shrank the world
On 26 April 1956 a converted wartime tanker, the Ideal X, left Port Newark for Houston with 58 truck trailers bolted to a deck built over her tanks. The trucker who sent her, Malcom McLean, had worked out that the costly part of shipping was not the sea but the docks, where every sack and crate was lifted by hand. Seventy years later a standard steel box can go from a factory in Shenzhen to a warehouse in Rotterdam without anyone opening it, and the biggest ships carry more than 24,000 of them.
This timeline follows the box from that first voyage to today: the fight over standard sizes, the war that proved the system, the old docks it emptied and the new ports it built, mostly in Asia, and the ships that grew, class by class, until the whole world noticed when one of them got stuck.
How it is laid out
Periods: the size classes of container ships (Panamax, post-Panamax, very large and ultra-large) as bands you can read against the ports and the carriers, plus the setting of the standard, the Vietnam supply line, the closing of London’s docks, the age of alliances and the three shocks of the 2020s.
Two zooms to the day and hour: the Ideal X voyage of April 1956 and the week in March 2021 when the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal.
Threads to filter by:
ports,ship size,standards,labour,businessanddisruption.The map: from Port Newark and Alameda to Cam Ranh Bay, Kwai Chung, Tanjong Pagar, Busan, Jebel Ali, Yantian, Yangshan, Tanger Med and the Suez Canal.
Capacities are in TEU, twenty-foot equivalent units: one standard 20-foot box; a 40-foot box counts as two. Marc Levinson’s The Box is the standard history; see also Containerization.
The container is at the core of a highly automated system for moving goods from anywhere, to anywhere, with a minimum of cost and complication on the way. — Marc Levinson, The Box, chapter 1
Items
The Warrior: one freighter’s worth of break-bulk cargo
Malcom McLean buys a shipping line
The Clifford J. Rogers, a ship built for boxes
Ideal X sails from Port Newark
Ideal X docks in Houston
Gateway City, the first cellular container ship
Matson’s Hawaiian Merchant sails for Honolulu
Matson’s gantry crane goes to work in Alameda
Grace Line’s containers stranded in Venezuela
Pan-Atlantic becomes Sea-Land
The ILWU’s Mechanization and Modernization Agreement
Elizabeth Marine Terminal opens in New Jersey
Sea-Land gives away its corner-fitting patents
Sea-Land’s Fairland crosses the Atlantic
Felixstowe opens its first container terminal
Europe Container Terminus opens in Rotterdam
The first container ship reaches Cam Ranh Bay
ISO R-668 fixes the size of the box
The Japan backhaul
Hakone Maru, Japan’s first container ship
McLean sells Sea-Land to R. J. Reynolds
Encounter Bay opens the Europe–Australia box trade
Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar terminal takes its first container ship
Liverpool’s Royal Seaforth Dock opens
Sea-Land’s SL-7s, the fastest cargo ships afloat
Hong Kong’s Kwai Chung terminal opens
Busan opens its first container terminal
Jebel Ali opens in Dubai
The Shipping Act of 1984
United States Lines’ Econships
United States Lines goes bankrupt
APL’s C10s, too wide for the Panama Canal
Rotterdam opens the first automated container terminal
Yantian opens in Shenzhen
Maersk buys Sea-Land’s ocean business
Maersk moves its hub to Tanjung Pelepas
Malcom McLean dies
China joins the World Trade Organization
Yangshan Deep-Water Port opens
Emma Mærsk is named at Odense
Tanger Med opens
Shanghai becomes the world’s busiest container port
Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, the first Triple-E
The Panama Canal’s new locks open
Hanjin Shipping files for receivership
The alliances regroup
HMM Algeciras, the first 24,000-TEU ship
Ever Given runs aground
Dredgers and tugs dig at the bow
The stern swings free
Ever Given is refloated
Yantian slows to a crawl after a COVID outbreak
A record queue off Los Angeles and Long Beach
MSC overtakes Maersk as the largest carrier
MSC Irina, the largest container ship yet
The Dali brings down Baltimore’s Key Bridge
Suez tonnage down 70 per cent
Shanghai handles 50 million TEU in a year
Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd start the Gemini Cooperation
Container lines begin to return to Suez