The shipping container is one of those rare devices, like the light bulb or the telephone, that can be traced to a single inventor, Malcom P. The author’s discursive prose, with much nautical lore and exhaustive data on ships’ characteristics (there is a separate index just for vessels’ names), makes his a book for ship spotters but of considerably less interest to the general reader.
Cudahy is a maritime historian, the focus is on the vessels rather than on the global implications of the technology. Box Boats describes essentially the same material, but since Brian J. The Box, by Marc Levinson, formerly an editor with The Economist, is a serious economic history that presents convincing evidence of the far-reaching-indeed, global-effects of the advent of the shipping container. On the face of it not a world-shaking event, yet it could be called the beginning of a revolution in transportation.īoth The Box and Box Boats have melodramatic subtitles: “How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” and “How Container Ships Changed the World.” If this sounds like hyperbole, it is warranted. Arriving in Houston, the bodies were unloaded, dropped onto trailer chassis, and hauled to their final destinations. The first full-fledged example of container shipping occurred in April 1956, when a refitted World War II tanker, the Ideal-X, sailed from Newark carrying fifty-eight containers-actually aluminum truck bodies with the wheels removed. Shipping containers are a recent American invention. What we do know is that not so long ago, there were none. Nobody knows exactly how many containers there are in the world, but estimates run as high as three hundred million.
Most people don’t give the ugly, utilitarian objects a second glance, except perhaps to note the names stenciled on their sides-Maersk, Hanjin, Evergreen-and probably to wonder where they come from.
Multicolored shipping containers are everywhere: piled up in stacks in ports, rolling down highways behind tractor trailers, and rumbling by on railroad flatcars.
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