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area would be accessible from above. The cells to hold the containers inside the ship were a tougher challenge. At the Alabama State Docks in Mobile, Keith Tantlinger built a mock-up 20 feet high. The cell guides, vertical strips of steel with a 90-degree angle to hold the corners of a container, were mounted on hydraulic jacks, which could be raised and lowered to simulate a heeling ship. A crane tried to deposit and remove a container from the cell while it was at various angles, and instruments measured the stresses and strains on the container and the cell as it tilted this way and that. After hundreds of tests, Tantlinger concluded that each cell should be 1$ inches longer than the container it was meant to hold and 3/4 of an inch wider; smaller dimensions made it too hard for the crane operator to ease the box into the cell guides, but larger ones allowed the container to shift too much. The cells were built and installed in the holds, giving the C-2s the ability to carry 226 containers, almost four times the load of the Ideal-X.2

Bigger ships with bigger loads would make loading and unloading vastly more complicated. The methods used for the smaller T-2s were no longer good enough: with 226 containers, a loading rate of one container every seven minutes would require a vessel to spend more than twenty-four hours in port to take on a full load. Every aspect of the operation needed to be redesigned for faster handling. Tantlinger invented a new trailer chassis, with edges sloped so that a container being lowered by a crane would be guided into place automatically. A new locking system allowed a longshoreman to secure or release the container by raising or lowering a handle at each corner of the chassis, doing away with the labor-intensive routine of using iron chains to prevent the box from slipping off the truck. These changes meant that a truck could deliver or take on a container and quickly drive away without occupying precious space at dockside. The containers themselves were redesigned with heavy steel corner posts to support the weight of more containers above them, and a new refrigerated version had the cooling unit set within the profile of the container, so that it could be stacked along with nonrefrigerated boxes. New doors were designed with the hinges recessed within the rear corner posts rather than protruding from the sides.

All of these new containers had a special steel casting built into each of their eight corners. The casting contained an oblong hole designed to accommodate the most critical invention of all, the twist lock. This device, with one conical section pointing down and another up, could be inserted into the corner castings of containers as they were stacked. When one was lowered upon the other, a longshoreman could quickly turn the handle and lock the two boxes tightly together. By pulling the handle the other way, a worker could release the two boxes in seconds when it was time to discharge the ship.3

Not until the cells and containers had been designed could Pan-Atlantic focus on the other critical component of its new operation, the cranes. The big dockside cranes in New York and Houston were inadequate to meet the new demands, and the other ports McLean wanted to serve lacked large cranes altogether. Shipboard cranes were the obvious answer, but existing shipboard cranes were not big enough to lift a 35-foot container weighing 40,000 pounds. No established maritime crane manufacturer could design and deliver a test model within the 90 days left in McLean’s ambitious schedule. In desperation, Tantlinger, who knew of the logging industry from his years in Washington State, proposed calling companies that manufactured diesel-powered logging cranes. Robert “Booze” Campbell, whose engineering firm helped redesign the ships and terminals, came upon the Skagit Steel & Iron Works in Sedro-Woolley, Washington.

Skagit Steel’s owner, Sidney McIntyre, had never worked on ships and was unfamiliar with electric cranes, but he agreed to build one. He was, in Campbell’s description, “a mechanical