The Box - Marc Levinson [1]
Academics drew on The Box to open some new lines of intellectual inquiry. There has been, as I discovered in the course of my research, very little serious study of the container and its consequences, except in the area of labor relations. That neglect is partly due to lack of data: chapter 13 lays out the obstacles to developing reliable estimates of how the container has changed transport costs since the 1950s. The reluctance of academics to cross traditional boundaries also has inhibited exploration of the container’s impact. One expert on logistics, for example, was quite familiar with containerships but told me he had never considered the container’s impact on shore. Mainly, however, I think academics have ignored the container be cause it seems so prosaic. A noted economic historian, a reader informed me, had long proclaimed to students that while the container was an important development, it was too simple to be worth much study. The book may at least have knocked down that last objection. It seems to have provided fodder for a variety of conferences and symposia, stimulating a new intellectual dialogue about the role of transportation in economic change.
The media have undertaken a similar reconsideration. Since the late 1980s, commentators have filled columns and airwaves with glib chatter about globalization, as if it were merely a matter of bits and bytes and corporate cost-cutting. Since The Box appeared, however, many news stories and articles have acknowledged that, digital communication notwithstanding, the integration of the world economy depends less on call centers and trans-Pacific exports of technical services than on the ability to move goods cheaply from here to there. The Box, I hope, has contributed to public understanding that inadequate port, road, and rail infrastructure can cause economic harm by raising the cost of moving freight.
Many aspects of the response to The Box were startling, but perhaps the most unexpected concerns a widespread stereotype about innovation. In his later years, Malcom McLean, the former trucker whose audacious scheme to create the first containership line is re counted in chapter 3, was frequently asked how he came up with the idea of the container. He responded with a tale about how, after spending hours in late 1937 queuing at a Jersey City pier to unload his truck, he realized that it would be quicker simply to hoist the entire truck body on board. From this incident, we are meant to believe, came his decision eighteen years later to buy a war-surplus tanker and equip it to carry 33-foot-long containers.
The story of this “Aha!” moment does not appear in The Box,because I believe the event never occurred. There is certainly no contemporaneous evidence for it. I suspect that the story of McLean’s stroke of genius took on a life of its own as, decades later, well-meaning people asked McLean where the container came from. As I show in chapter 2, ship lines and railroads had been experimenting with containers for half a century before Malcom McLean’s trip to Jersey City, and containers were already in wide use in North America and Europe when McLean’s first ship set sail in 1956.
Malcom McLean’s real contribution to the development of containerization, in my view, had to do not with a metal box or a ship, but with a managerial insight. McLean understood that transport companies’ true business was moving freight rather than operating ships or trains. That understanding helped his version of containerization succeed where so many others had failed. To my consternation, though, I quickly learned that many people quite fancy the tale of McLean’s dockside epiphany. The idea of a single moment of inspiration, of the apple landing on young Isaac Newton’s head, stirs the soul, even if it turns out to be apocryphal. In contrast, the idea that innovation occurs in fits and starts, with one person adapting a concept already in use and another figuring out how to make a profit