From Tedium, December 9:
Compartmentalizing
How the shipping container, a dominant force in ocean shipping, came from a truck driver whose invention proved to be too good at its job.
Today in Tedium: It’s not often discussed, but one form of transportation can inspire another. Think about it. Before Orville and Wilbur Wright decided to test the skies, they (and other early fight enthusiasts) spent years learning the trade of bicycle repair. Robert Fulton developed the first practical submarine—and the first steamboat. Carriage makers attempted (and, honestly, failed) to translate their skill set from horses to railroads. But no example perhaps nails down this dynamic more perfectly than that of the container ship. On the surface, putting predetermined containers on giant freight ships seems like an obvious idea, but let’s be honest—it wasn’t. But systematizing the way we shipped complex goods was one of the smartest things the modern freight industry ever did—and it was a guy who had nothing to do with ships that came up with it. Today’s Tedium ponders the interesting, unusual story of the truck driver who saw a vision for ships that nobody else did—and the problems that ultimately created. — Ernie @ TediumShipping containers: How software’s best metaphor evolved from shipping’s best idea
If you’re a developer or even modestly nerdy about technology, you probably are familiar with the concept of Docker and containerization. It’s the idea of being able to run a number of separate virtualized or abstracted computers inside a larger one.
Docker isn’t the first example of its approach—you have to look to FreeBSD’s “jails” concept for that one. But the decision to explicitly brand it around shipping containers, down to its logo, speaks to the conceptual brilliance of the shipping container.
Putting this in computer software terms: Traditionally, when you install an application, it sprays data around your computer. That can get terribly complicated to manage and can even degrade the performance of your operating system over time as multiple apps do the same thing. But by keeping that app together, it applies some operational consistency.
This explains why these sorts of organizing elements—be they Snaps, Pods, Flatpaks, or AppImages—have become so popular on Linux. While Docker (which is more focused on the server side of things than Snaps or Flatpaks are) works differently from most of those technically, it reflects a certain conceptual lineage.
Now apply this concept to physical cargo, and you can see the appeal. If you put 1,000 smartphones or 1,000 lawn chairs on a plane or ship, you don’t just leave them out loosey-goosey. That not only is harder to manage, it can also cost more, too, because there is more labor involved. And there’s always a risk that one shipment might get mixed up with another, causing serious problems.
Put simply, we needed a way to ensure that if a manufacturer had a product that they wanted to ship halfway across the world, it was left fully intact and untouched during the import process. That’s where the container comes into play.
And oddly enough, this idea came not from the world of ships, but the world of trucking—specifically from the owner of a trucking company who had spent his early career working around the limitations of his local market.
Malcom McLean—born Malcolm, but having removed the second L himself—essentially came to the trucking industry from nothing. He took interest in the delivery driver who dropped off oil to his Red Springs, North Carolina gas station, and made $5 for the task—not a small amount of money in 1933, the equivalent of $125 today. Eventually, he got access to a dump truck, which he then leased out—using the revenue from that to buy another truck. Within a few years, McLean had upgraded to shipping textiles, and within two decades, the firm had thousands of trucks to its name.
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And he didn’t even get to the container ships part yet!
(Journal and Sentinel/Newspapers.com)
In a fawning 1953 profile in his local newspaper, the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, writer Chester S. Davis explained why starting a trucking company in North Carolina, specifically, was a solution to a problem:
For the first 350 years of its history North Carolina has been crippled by inadequate transportation. Our coast is the most treacherous on the eastern seaboard. We have no first-rate natural harbors. Only one of our rivers—the Cape Fear—empties into the ocean. The others drain into shallow coastal sounds or, like the Yadkin-Pee Dee, flow into other states.
Combine that with the mountain terrain on the western part of the state, and you have a complicated state of affairs for getting goods into the state. Often, goods delivered by ship would have to go into a nearby port—such as the natural one in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region—to get delivered elsewhere.
North Carolina’s trucking industry grew quickly in the 1940s as a result, especially thanks to firms like the McLean Trucking Company, a firm that had expanded to 12 states at the time of the 1953 piece. Many firms in the sector started not unlike McLean’s. “The industry has been built out by a bunch of horny-handed characters who started out as truck drivers,” Davis wrote, McLean included.
But Malcom, as the piece states, had a vision. That vision was so broad and unexpected that there’s no way Davis could have known that in a decade, Malcom would own one of the largest maritime shipping concerns in the world. Not trucking—maritime.
And it comes down to a perception that nobody else was really considering—an idea he filed a patent application for just a year after the 1953 piece.
1955
The year that the shipping company Wallenius Line developed the first purpose-built “ro-ro” shipping freighter. This shipping use case, referring to “roll-on/roll-off,” was a type of freighter specifically for finished vehicles. The concept played a significant role in the globalization of the auto industry by making it possible to cost-effectively import cars to other parts of the world. While the cars are built a little more piecemeal today, if you’ve ever driven a Toyota imported from Japan, you have a ro-ro to thank for making that market possible.
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shipping and trucking, and it resulted in this patent. (Google Patents)
How shipping containers reshaped the global freight industry
Tankers were already quite common in the 1950s, but they had a significant problem: They weren’t really designed to carry lots of different kinds of things. If a tanker was moving oil between coasts, there wasn’t really room for anything other than oil.
This was inefficient for multiple reasons: For one thing, if you were delivering oil from one port to another, it’s not like the tanker was going to bring oil back with it—that’s not how oil works. That meant a return trip was a function of sheer location and was otherwise completely fruitless.
Compare this to trucking—when McLean’s crew delivered textiles up north, they often brought something back with them. What if you could apply this thinking to ships?....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
In Praise of Shipping Containers: "The Box That Built the Modern World"Shipping:
"How The Vietnam War Gave Birth To Container Shipping — And Changed The World" (port of Oakland)
Coffee and Container Ships "The Real Reason Coffee Has Gotten So Fancy"
And the complete Fusion production of Containers:
Containers is an 8-part audio documentary about how global trade has transformed the economy and ourselves. Host and correspondent Alexis Madrigal leads you through the world of ships and sailors, technology and tugboats, warehouses and cranes. At a time when Donald Trump is threatening to toss out the global economic order, Containers provides an illuminating, deep, and weird look at how capitalism actually works now.....
More on the Shipping Container Shortage: "A Mafia"
Shipping: "How three Chinese companies cornered global container production"
Shipping: "Containers are ‘the new gold’ amid ‘black swan’ box squeeze"Shipping: "Where are all the containers? The global shortage explained"
Shipping: Containers, Containers, Containers
It's all anyone can talk about.
For our newer readers we happened to be correctly positioned in shipping and logistics when covid hit and freight rates and warehouse lease rates went wild. The happy time.
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It was rather lonely in 2019 when we were pitching warehouses and cold storage facilities but by December 2020 we were posting stuff like:
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It's always nice to see a sector you've been babbling about for a couple years finally referred to as a bubble.
