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readily available materials—ammonium nitrate fertilizer, propane, explosives embedded with nails—without going to the trouble of building a “dirty bomb.” Nonetheless, containers suddenly came into public consciousness as an urgent threat, one that no government anywhere was equipped to confront. A large-scale spending program inevitably followed, with radiation detectors appearing at port gates and port workers mandated to wear supposedly tamper-proof identity cards. Whether these efforts have improved security remains unclear; tests using satellites to track container shipments from origin to destination have not been promising. The frenetic attempt to bolster security at the ports, however, may have created a risk that may be even more difficult to address: the risk that precipitous government orders to detain vessels or close ports in the face of a real or imagined terrorist action could cause grave damage to economies all around the world.

The history of the shipping container is humbling. Careful planning and thorough analysis have their place, but they provide little guidance in the face of abrupt changes that alter an industry’s very fundamentals. Flexibility is a virtue in such a situation. Resistance can be a vice, but so can a rush to action. In this kind of situation, “expect the unexpected” may be as good a motto as any.

Just as no one in the container’s early years dreamed that the world’s ports would soon be handling the arrival of one-and-a-half million 40-foot containers every week, so, too, did no one conceive that steel shipping containers could be turned into houses and sculptures or that abandoned containers would become a serious nuisance. That simple metal box was what we today label a disruptive technology. Even now, more than half a century after it came into use, it continues to affect our world in unexpected ways.

October 2007

Acknowledgments

Container shipping is not ancient history, but much relatively recent source material proved surprisingly difficult to locate. Many relevant corporate records have been destroyed. The early growth of containerization was nurtured by the Port of New York Authority (now the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey), but many of that agency’s records were destroyed in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That this book came to be is a tribute to the work of the many dedicated archivists and librarians who helped me identify extant materials in collections that researchers rarely look at, as well as to private individuals who combed their own files for important records.

Back in the early 1990s, when I first thought of writing about Malcom McLean, George Stevenson of the North Carolina State Archives came up with hard-to-find material about the McLean family. When I decided to revisit containerization more recently, Kenneth Cobb of the New York Municipal Archives, Doug DiCarlo of the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College in New York, and Bette M. Epstein of the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton helped me piece together the story of how the container decimated New York’s port.

The lack of historical material on the International Longshoremen’s Association is a serious impediment to historical work on longshore labor relations. Gail Malmgreen of the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University helped me locate documents and oral histories in that remarkable collection. Patrizia Sione and Melissa Holland of the Kheel Center, Catherwood Library, at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, guided me through the papers of Vernon Jensen, which contain a wealth of detail on the ILA.

Military history is not my field, but my efforts to learn about the role of container shipping in the Vietnam War benefited from much expert guidance. Gina Akers and Wade Wyckoff of the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center, in Washington, helped me with the records of the Military Sea Transportation Service and with the U.S. Navy’s extensive collection of oral