The Origin of Shipping Containers
Nowadays, shipping containers are used by freight forwarding companies all over the world to transport various types of cargo. Surprisingly, they are not age-old inventions.
Shipping containers are an integral part of freight forwarding and logistics management. They are used for transporting a wide variety of goods all over the world. Yet, these important carriers of cargo did not even exist only 6 decades ago. Let’s take a brief look at the evolution of shipping containers chronologically.
During the bygone eras of the Egyptians, Romans and Greeks, goods were moved in nearly the same way as they are today, via ships and boats. But the whole process lacked standardisation extensively and was very slow as well as difficult. The goods were initially stored at port warehouses, where labours loaded them into bales, crates, sacks and barrels. An empty vessel arrived at the port warehouses and took these containers away. This procedure was called break bulk, which is quite similar to the break bulk shipping services offered by modern day logistics management companies.
Around the later years of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, people involved in the shipping industry started seeing deficiency of standardisation as a major concern in the traditional break bulk process. Transferring cargo between trains & ships was a sluggish process, and caused blockages and delays in several ports. However, implementation of standardised transport method required aligning of port terminals, trains, trucks and ships.
In 1937, an American businessman named Malcom Purcell McLean started to look for efficient ways in order to transport cargo. For creating a shipping container to carry heavy loads, McLean sold off his trucking trade in 1955 and received an amount of $25 million. Using over ⅓rd of the amount, he purchased the Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company and changed its name to SeaLand Industries. He went for testing variations of his innovation and ultimately settled with one that was stackable, lockable and could be easily loaded as well as unloaded.
During the first half of 1955, McLean took a loan of $500 million and bought 2 Second World War T-2 tankers. After converting them into containers, he arranged for one transformed tanker to be loaded and sailed from New Jersey to Houston. The project was a huge success and McLean ordered for manufacture of the first container carrying ship, the Gateway City.
After that, it only took a decade for the first international voyage of shipping containers, which took place in April 1966 from USA to Netherlands. The ship named Fairland sailed with 236 containers. And that is how the uber-modern shipping holders gradually came to be used by companies all around the world.
