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the “inventor” of the shipping container. Metal cargo boxes of various shapes and sizes had been in use for decades, and numerous reports and studies supported the idea of containerized freight before the Ideal-X set sail. An American steamship operator, Seatrain Lines, had operated specially built ships holding railway boxcars in metal cells as early as 1929, lifting the boxcars on and off with large dockside cranes. These ample precedents have led historians to downplay the nature of Malcom McLean’s achievements. His container was just a “new adaptation of a long-used transportation formula whose birth dates to the early years of the twentieth century,” French historian Rene Borruey asserts. American historian Donald Fitzgerald concurs: “Rather than a revolution, containerization of the 1950s was a chapter in the history of development of maritime cargo transportation.”31

In a narrow sense, of course, these critics are correct. The high cost of freight handling was widely recognized as a critical problem in the early 1950s, and containers were much discussed as a potential solution. Malcom McLean was not writing on a blank slate. Yet the historians’ debate about precedence misses the transformational nature of McLean’s accomplishment. While many companies had tried putting freight into containers, those early containers did not fundamentally alter the economics of shipping and had no wider consequences.

Malcom McLean’s fundamental insight, commonplace today but quite radical in the 1950s, was that the shipping industry’s business was moving cargo, not sailing ships. That insight led him to a concept of containerization quite different from anything that had come before. McLean understood that reducing the cost of shipping goods required not just a metal box but an entire new way of handling freight. Every part of the system—ports, ships, cranes, storage facilities, trucks, trains, and the operations of the shippers themselves—would have to change. In that understanding, he was years ahead of almost everyone else in the transportation industry. His insights ushered in change so dramatic that even the experts at the International Container Bureau, people who had been pushing containers for decades, were astonished at what he had wrought. As one of that organization’s leaders confessed later, “we did not understand that at that time a revolution was taking place in the U.S.A.”32

* The younger McLean was named Malcolm at birth and continued to spell his name that way until after 1950, when he changed the spelling to Malcom. To avoid confusion, he is referred to as “Malcom” throughout this account.

Chapter 4

The System

A dock strike loomed over East Coast ports in the autumn of 1956. Facing the prospect that the Pan-Atlantic and Waterman fleets would sit idle, Malcom McLean decided to use the time to advantage. Six of Waterman’s C-2 freighters were transferred to Pan-Atlantic’s control. They were sent to Waterman’s shipyard in Mobile, which had been closed after World War II but was reopened to convert them into pure containerships. The idea was to build a honeycomb of metal cells in the holds so that 35-foot containers, two feet longer than those carried on the Ideal-X, could be lowered in and stacked five or six high. The ships were to be rebuilt and back at sea by 1957. Of course, there was no model of a pure containership, the metal cells did not exist, and no one had ever stacked containers five or six high. How tightly should the containers fit into the cells? How would a stack of six containers behave when a ship rolled in heavy seas? And how could the vessels be unloaded at ports where there were no land-based cranes? As was his way, McLean did not preoccupy himself with such details. He simply told his staff to get the job done.1

The C-2s, unlike Pan-Atlantic’s T-2 tankers, had been designed to carry large amounts of mixed cargo in their five holds, and altering them posed no great problem. The decks were widened from 63 feet to 72 feet, and the hatches were expanded so that the entire container storage