The Box That Waited Thirty Years

AThe ship that left Newark on 26 April 1956 carrying fifty-eight metal boxes on the deck of a converted tanker has become the compulsory opening of every account of modern trade. Malcom McLean, a road haulier who had never run a shipping line, is said to have watched lorries queue at a quayside and asked why the trailer needed to be unpacked at all. The difficulty with the anecdote is that the box itself was not new. Railway companies in Britain and the United States had been moving sealed containers between wagon and lorry since the 1920s, and a French line experimented with something similar before the First World War. If the object explained the revolution, the revolution should have arrived thirty years earlier. What changed in the 1950s was not the invention of a box but the assembly of a system around it, and historians disagree sharply over which part of that system did the work.

BBreak-bulk loading was slow in a way that is now hard to picture. A general-cargo vessel of the early 1950s might spend six days alongside for every three at sea, because sacks, drums, crates and bales were swung aboard singly and stowed by hand so that the ship stayed in trim. Ingrid Solberg, who reconstructed the accounts of eleven North Atlantic operators between 1949 and 1971, calculates that handling absorbed forty-one per cent of the cost of moving a ton of mixed cargo, while the ocean passage itself accounted for under a fifth. The rest went on insurance, port dues and pilferage, the last of which the clerks entered in their ledgers with a resignation suggesting it had long been treated as a running expense rather than a crime. A container did not sail faster than a crate. What it removed was the time in port, and with it the greater part of that forty-one per cent.

CSolberg's account of the timing rests on the corner casting, a steel block set into each edge of the box and shaped so that a crane's twist-lock could drop into it and turn. Until the dimensions of that block were agreed, a container was worth no more than the cranes of the firm that owned it, and no shipper would load a box that a single line alone could lift. The agreements, drafted between 1965 and 1970, fixed lengths, heights and the tolerances of the castings. In her sample, ports that had converted at least two berths before 1968 were moving 3.4 times as much tonnage per metre of quay by 1975 as ports that converted afterwards. The decisive artefact, she concludes, was a document rather than a machine: the engineering had been available for decades, and what arrived in the late 1960s was a rule that made one company's equipment usable by everybody else.

DDaniel Marchetti does not dispute Solberg's figures; he disputes what she has ranked first. A crane that can lift a sealed box is of no use where the men on the quay hold a contract to open it, and in the older ports employment ran through registers that guaranteed a fixed number of gangs to every ship. The New York settlement of 1960 bought out those guarantees in exchange for a levy on each container passing the terminal, and comparable bargains were struck in Rotterdam in 1966 and in London only in 1972. Marchetti's league table of conversion dates follows the settlements rather than the standards. Felixstowe, an obscure harbour that shipped under thirty thousand tons in 1965, took traffic from Liverpool and London within a decade, and it did so, on his reading, because it had never carried a register of dock labour at all. The box did not defeat the dockers. It was licensed by them.

EGeography obliged as well. A container terminal wants deep water, flat land for stacking and a rail head, and wants nothing whatever from the warehouses and merchant houses that had gathered around the old city quays; the trade therefore moved downstream, to Europoort below Rotterdam and to estuary sites that had never mattered before. Nor was the traffic wholly commercial. From 1967 the American military chartered container capacity to supply its forces in Vietnam, and because the charter paid for the outbound leg, operators could fill the returning ships with Japanese manufactures at rates that would never have covered a round voyage on their own. It is tempting to read the resulting Pacific boom as the market discovering the cheapest route. Half of each circuit, for several years, was paid for by a government that was not thinking about freight rates at all.

FEach side has conceded something awkward. Solberg accepts that four ports in her sample standardised early and lost traffic regardless, because their rail approaches had been built for lighter axle loads and could not take a doubled stack; the document, in those cases, bought nothing. Marchetti accepts in turn that the London register survived until 1972 although the port's tonnage had begun to fall in 1968, four years before any settlement, which is hard to explain if bargaining alone set the pace. Neither concession rescues the other man's thesis, but together they mark out the ground on which both are standing. The box moved where it was permitted to move and where the land behind the quay could carry what came off it, and the histories that treat 1956 as a starting gun are describing the least interesting of the conditions that had to be met.