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By Root 929 0

feet above the dock, were designed to move on tracks installed on the dock, parallel to the ship. Pan-Atlantic dismantled them, cut twenty feet out of their structures, and shipped them off to Newark and Houston, while port workers at both locations reinforced the piers to accommodate the added weight and installed the rails and large power supplies the cranes required. Hanging from the cranes was another money-saving piece of equipment newly invented by Tantlinger, a spreader bar stretching the entire length and width of a container. The spreader eliminated the need for longshoremen to climb ladders to the roof of each container and attach hooks dangling from the crane. Instead, the crane operator, sitting in a cab sixty feet above the dock, could lower the spreader over a container and engage the hooks at each corner with the flip of a switch. Once the box had been lifted and moved, another flip of the switch would disengage the hooks, without a worker on the ground touching the container.27

McLean wanted to start Pan-Atlantic’s new service in 1955. The government did not move quite so fast. Not until late 1955, after months of hearings, did the ICC overrule objections from the railroads and authorize Pan-Atlantic to carry containers between Newark and Houston. Delays in gaining Coast Guard approval pushed the start date back further. On April 26, 1956, one hundred dignitaries enjoyed lunch at Port Newark and watched the crane place a container on the Ideal-X every seven minutes. The ship was loaded in less than eight hours and set sail the same day. McLean and his executives flew to Houston to watch the arrival. “They were all waiting on Wharf II for the ship to arrive, and as she came up the channel, all the longshoremen and everybody else came over to look,” one witness recalled. “They were amazed to see a tanker with all these boxes on deck. We had seen thousands of tankers in Houston, but never one like this. So everybody looked at this monstrosity and they couldn’t believe their eyes.” For McLean, though, the real triumph came only when the costs were tallied. Loading loose cargo on a medium-size cargo ship cost $5.83 per ton in 1956. McLean’s experts pegged the cost of loading the Ideal-X at 15.8 cents per ton. With numbers like that, the container seemed to have a future.28

Pan-Atlantic’s Sea-Land Service was in business, meeting a schedule of one weekly sailing in each direction between Newark and Houston. Pan-Atlantic itself was barred from owning trucks, but it contracted with trucking companies to pick up shipments at customers’ loading docks and to carry arriving containers to their final destinations. Between April and December, Pan-Atlantic completed forty-four container voyages along the East and Gulf coasts. In a typical McLean touch, his engineers figured out that through the addition of small deck extensions, the tankers’ capacity could be increased from 58 containers to 60 and then 62. If there was a way to squeeze a dollop of extra revenue from the aging tankers, McLean would find it.29

Again, the railroad and trucking industries did their best to close down the show. They protested vehemently that McLean’s takeover of Waterman without ICC approval was a blatant violation of the Interstate Commerce Act. Although Waterman had renounced its domestic operating rights to escape ICC jurisdiction, that renunciation had not been accepted by the ICC—and Pan-Atlantic’s request for “temporary” authority to take over the Waterman rights, keeping them in the corporate family, made the entire deal look suspicious. In November 1956, an ICC examiner agreed. Although Malcom McLean was a “man of vision, determination and considerable executive talent,” the examiner said, his purchase of Waterman without commission approval broke the law. As punishment, he recommended that McLean Industries be forced to divest Waterman. The ICC rejected the examiner’s recommendation in 1957, leaving McLean in control of both Pan-Atlantic and Waterman, and, more important, of Waterman’s large fleet.30

Malcom McLean was by no means