The Box - Marc Levinson [29]
The money was never spent, because McLean reconsidered his plan. He had realized that carrying trailers on ships was inefficient: the wheels beneath each trailer would waste a lot of precious shipboard space. Pondering that problem, McLean came up with a still more radical idea. A government maritime-promotion program made leftover World War II tankers available to ship lines very cheaply. Pan-Atlantic would buy two and convert them to haul truck trailer bodies—trailers detached from their steel beds, axles, and wheels. Subtracting the frames and wheels would reduce the space occupied by each trailer by one-third. Even better, the trailer bodies could be stacked, whereas trailers with wheels could not be. As McLean envisioned it, a truck would pull the trailer alongside the ship, where the trailer body, filled with twenty tons of freight, would be detached from its steel chassis and lifted aboard ship. At the other end of the voyage, the trailer body would be lowered onto an empty chassis and hauled to its destination.22
The concept was costed out on Ballentine Beer, which McLean Trucking hauled from Newark. Analysts for the Port of New York Authority calculated that sending the beer to Miami on board a traditional coastal ship, including a truck trip to the port, unloading, stacking in a transit shed, removal from the transit shed, wrapping in netting, hoisting aboard ship, and stowage, would cost four dollars a ton, with unloading at the Miami end costing as much again. The container alternative—loading the beer into a container at the brewery and lifting the container aboard a specially designed ship—was estimated to cost twenty-five cents a ton. Container shipping would be 94 percent cheaper than breakbulk shipping of the same product, even allowing for the cost of the container.23
Tankers, of course, were not the ideal vessels for such a mission, but they reduced the financial risk. If no one wanted to ship containers on the return trip from Houston to Newark, the vessels could still make money carrying oil. McLean portrayed these “lift on-lift off” ships as “forerunners” of the roll on-roll off ships he intended to build with the government guarantees, but plans for the trailerships were pushed to the side and finally abandoned.24
The concept that became container shipping was Malcom McLean’s. But in early 1955, when McLean jettisoned his plan to put entire truck trailers on Pan-Atlantic’s ships and decided instead to carry just trailer bodies, he could not simply buy the equipment off the shelf. Small steel boxes were readily available, but it was obvious that lowering them into the hold and stowing them amid assorted bags and bales, the way other ship lines occasionally did, would bring little by way of cost savings. Truck trailer bodies could be purchased as well, but moving trailers weighing tens of thousands of pounds apart from their chassis and wheels was by no means a routine operation. McLean, impatient to build a business, demanded that his staff find a way to turn his concept into reality. In March, a Pan-Atlantic executive named George Kempton placed a call to Keith Tantlinger.
Tantlinger, then thirty-five, was chief engineer at Brown Industries in Spokane, Washington, and had already built a reputation as a container expert. Brown had been building truck trailers since 1932, and Tantlinger’s job, along with designing trailers for trucking companies, involved speaking at industry meetings to promote Brown’s products. In 1949, he had designed what was probably the first modern shipping container, a 30-foot aluminum box that could be stacked two high on barges operating between Seattle and Alaska or placed on a chassis and pulled by a truck. The order involved only two hundred containers, and despite much curiosity, no other orders followed. “Everybody was interested, but nobody wanted to reach for his pocketbook,” Tantlinger