Transcript
Introduction
On April 26, 1956, a crane lifted 58 aluminum truck bodies aboard an aging tanker ship moored in Newark, New Jersey. Five days later, the Ideal X sailed into Houston, where 58 trucks waited to take on the metal boxes and haul them to their destinations, such was the beginning of a revolution. Decades later when enormous trailer trucks rule the highways and trains hauling nothing but stacks of boxes rumble through the night, it is hard to fathom just how much the container has changed the world. In 1956, China was not the world's workshop. It was not routine for shoppers to find Brazilian shoes and Mexican vacuum cleaners in stores in the middle of Kansas.
Japanese families did not eat beef from cattle raised in Wyoming, and French clothing designers did not have their exclusive apparel cut and sewn in Turkey or Vietnam. Before the container, transporting goods was expensive, so expensive that it did not pay to ship many things halfway across the country, much less halfway across the world. What is it about the container that is so important? Surely, not the thing itself, a soulless aluminum or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and 2 enormous doors at one end, the standard container has all the romance of a tin can. The value of this utilitarian object lies not in what it is, but in how it is used. 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.