The Box - Marc Levinson [12]
Mysteriously, the container has escaped all three of these very lively fields of research. It has no engine, no wheels, no sails: it does not fascinate those captivated by ships and trains and planes, or by sailors and pilots. It lacks the flash to draw attention from those who study technological innovation. And so many forces have combined to alter economic geography since the middle of the twentieth century that the container is easily overlooked. There is, half a century after its arrival, no general history of the container.17
In telling the remarkable story of containerization, this book represents an attempt to fill that historical void. It treats containerization not as shipping news, but as a development that has sweeping consequences for workers and consumers all around the globe. Without it, the world would be a very different place.
Chapter 2
Gridlock on the Docks
In the early 1950s, before container shipping was even a concept, most of the world’s great centers of commerce had docks at their heart. Freight transportation was an urban industry, employing millions of people who drove, dragged, or pushed cargo through city streets to or from the piers. On the waterfront itself, swarms of workers clambered up gangplanks with loads on their backs or toiled deep in the holds of ships, stowing boxes and barrels in every available corner. Warehouses stood at the heads of many of the wharves, and where there were no warehouses, there were factories. As they had for centuries, manufacturers still clustered near the docks for easier delivery of raw materials and faster shipment of finished goods. Whether in San Francisco or Montreal, Hamburg or London, Rio or Buenos Aires, the surrounding neighborhoods were filled with households that made their livings from the port, bound together by the special nature of waterfront work and the unique culture that developed from it.
Though ships had been plying the seas for thousands of years, using them to move goods was still a hugely complicated project in the 1950s. At the shipper’s factory or warehouse, the freight would be loaded piece by piece on a truck or railcar. The truck or train would deliver hundreds or thousands of such items to the water-front. Each had to be unloaded separately, recorded on a tally sheet, and carried to storage in a transit shed, a warehouse stretching alongside the dock. When a ship was ready to load, each item was removed from the transit shed, counted once more, and hauled or dragged to shipside. The dock would be covered with a jumble of paperboard cartons and wooden crates and casks. There might be steel drums of cleaning compound and beef tallow alongside 440-pound bales of cotton and animal skins. Borax in sacks so heavy it took two men to lift them, loose pieces of lumber, baskets of freshly picked oranges, barrels of olives, and coils of steel wire might all be part of the same load of “mixed cargo,” waiting on the dock amid a tangle of ropes and cables, as lift trucks and handcarts darted back and forth.
Getting all of this loaded was the job of the longshoremen. On the dock or in the pierside warehouse, a gang of longshore workers would assemble various boxes and barrels into a “draft” of cargo atop a wooden pallet, the sling board. Some sling loads were wrapped in rope or netting, but