Containerization

Containerization moves freight in standardized, sealed steel boxes that transfer directly between ship, rail and truck without ever being unpacked in between, replacing the older practice of loading and unloading cargo piece by piece at every stage of a journey, known as break-bulk shipping. The American trucking entrepreneur Malcolm McLean is credited with proving the idea commercially, converting a tanker ship, the Ideal-X, to carry 58 truck trailer bodies from Newark to Houston in 1956, and the International Organization for Standardization fixed common container dimensions in the 1960s so a box loaded anywhere in the world could be handled by the same cranes, ships, railcars and trucks everywhere else. The economic effect was much larger than a shipping convenience: container handling cut the cost and time of moving freight through a port by a large margin compared with break-bulk cargo, and that collapse in transport cost is one of the enabling conditions historians and economists point to for the late twentieth century growth of globally dispersed manufacturing supply chains, making containerization a strong candidate for a cross-atlas link into the economics of global trade.