The Box - Marc Levinson [30]
McLean the trucker had never done business with Brown Industries. Now that he was in the shipping business, though, McLean wanted Tantlinger’s expertise—immediately. The next morning, Tantlinger flew to Mobile, where Pan-Atlantic was based. “I understand you know everything there is to know about containers,” was McLean’s gruff greeting. McLean explained his plan. He proposed to use containers thirty-three feet long, a length chosen because the available deck space aboard the T-2 tankers was divisible by thirty-three. These boxes were at least seven times the size of any containers then in common use. Rather than having longshoremen stow them with other cargo in a ship’s hold, he proposed to install metal frames, called flying decks or spardecks, above the tangle of pipes that covered the decks of his two tankers. The spardecks would hold the containers eight abreast. The idea was to attach six steel pieces, each a foot long with a small hole at the bottom, to the sides of each container. When the container was loaded on board ship, the steel pieces would slide vertically through slots in the frame of the spardeck, and a rod would be inserted through the holes, underneath the frame, to lock the container in place. Most important, the containers Pan-Atlantic planned to use would be designed to be shifted easily among ships, trucks, and trains.26
McLean’s trucking superintendent, Cecil Egger, had begun experiments with two old Fruehauf truck trailers that had been strengthened with A-shaped steel brackets welded to each side. Tantlinger quickly saw that the system was unworkable: the containers were meant to be locked in placed with steel pieces protruding beneath them, making them impossible to stack, and the A-shaped brackets made the trailers too wide and too tall for the highways. Tantlinger told McLean that standard Brown containers, which used the aluminum sides and roof to bear most of the load, would do the job. McLean ordered two 33-foot containers, to be delivered in two weeks to the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Baltimore, which was altering the tankers. On the appointed day, Tantlinger was to meet Pan-Atlantic executives for breakfast at the Lord Baltimore Hotel. When they failed to arrive, he called the shipyard and learned that the men were already there. Tantlinger rushed to the shipyard, where Malcom and Jim McLean, Kempton, and Egger were jumping up and down on the roof of a container. Tantlinger had told Malcom McLean that the wafer-thin aluminum roof was strong enough to keep the container rigid, and the McLean group was trying, unsuccessfully, to disprove his claim. Sold on the merits of Brown’s containers, McLean ordered two hundred boxes and demanded that the reluctant Tantlinger move to Mobile to be his chief engineer.
Part of Tantlinger’s job was to convince the American Bureau of Shipping, which sets standards for maritime insurers, that the Ideal-X would be seaworthy when loaded with containers, while the U.S. Coast Guard wanted assurance that the containers would not endanger the ship’s crew. After negotiation, the Coast Guard agreed to a test. Pan-Atlantic asked trucking company workers to load two containers with cardboard boxes filled with coke briquets, a cargo of average density and negligible cost. The boxes were lashed to the spardeck of one of the converted T-2s. The ship then sailed back and forth between Newark and Houston, the Coast Guard checking the load after each voyage, until a trip though heavy seas persuaded that maritime agency that loaded containers were safe. Photos of the test, showing the stacks of cardboard boxes dry and firmly in place after each voyage, got the Bureau of Shipping’s approval.
And then there was the matter of loading. Most cargo ships in the 1950s had winches that allowed them to load and unload in any port, but a standard shipboard winch could not shift a twenty-ton container without destabilizing the ship. The solution took the form of two huge revolving cranes at a disused shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania. The cranes, with booms seventy-two