Fifty Years of the Shipping Container

In case you forgot, this year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the shipping container, that ubiquitous item that is forever traveling on ships, trains, and trucks across the oceans and continents.

It has provoked an explosion in world trade. And the reason is the same it always is. The container has radically reducing the cost of shipping.

When the first container ship, the Ideal-X, a converted World War II oil tanker, made its first trip in 1956 from Newark to Houston with 58 containers aboard, it reduced the cost of loading by over 95 percent. According to the Economist (needs sub) of London, the cost of loading loose cargo into a medium-sized ship back in 1956 was $5.83 per ton. It is estimated that it cost $0.16 per ton to load the Ideal-X.

That is a big deal. John D. Rockefeller merely reduced the cost of illuminating oil by 90 percent. Andrew Carnegie was a piker. He only reduced the cost of steel by about two-thirds.

Of course it has been rough on the dock workers. They used to do pretty well enjoying the odd “breakage.”

But the change opened up all sorts of possibilities.

Instead of manufacturing goods locally, a company could afford to replace its overcrowded multi-storey factory in Brooklyn with one in Pennsylvania, where taxes, electricity and other costs were lower, and then ship its goods to New York in a container. Later the factory might move to Mexico; it is now probably in China.

Here’s a factoid to think about. The new container ships on the drawing boards “ill be able to carry enough containers to fill a line of trucks 68 miles long.”