The Box - Marc Levinson [34]
The combination of cells and gantry cranes allowed the containers to be handled with unprecedented speed. Once the first column of cells had been unloaded, the ship could be loaded and unloaded simultaneously, in assembly-line fashion: each time the crane traveled to the dock to deposit an incoming trailer on an empty chassis, it would pick up an outgoing trailer and place it into an empty cell. With two cranes, each loading and unloading fifteen boxes an hour, the Gateway City, the first of the converted C-2s, could be emptied and reloaded in just eight hours. The new ships were “[t]he greatest advance made by the United States merchant marine in our time,” said Congressman Herbert Bonner, chairman of the Merchant Marine Committee. Tantlinger was not so certain. Before the Gateway City’s first voyage, on October 4, 1957, he dropped by the F. W. Woolworth store in Newark and purchased all of the store’s modeling clay. He cut the clay into small pieces with his pocket knife and wedged several pieces in the narrow spaces between the corners of the top containers and the metal frames of the cells. When the Gateway City docked in Miami three days later, he retrieved the clay to see how much the containers had shifted. The indentations on the clay revealed that they had moved by only of one inch—proof, at last, that a stack of containers in the hold would not sway dangerously as a containership rolled at sea.5
Pan-Atlantic had four of its six pure containerships in service by the end of 1957, with a ship sailing south from New York or east from Houston every four and a half days. The last two converted C-2s joined the fleet early in 1958. The Ideal-X and its sister tankers were sold off, along with 490 of the original 33-foot containers and 300 matching chassis. Pan-Atlantic’s Sea-Land Service, its capacity five times larger than it had been a year earlier, seemed poised for explosive growth.6
Instead, it sailed into trouble. McLean planned to use two of the all-container ships to open service to Puerto Rico in March 1958. Puerto Rico was a potentially lucrative market. As an island, it relied on ships to provide almost all of its consumer goods. As a U.S. commonwealth, it was subject to the Jones Act, a law requiring that cargo moving between U.S. ports use American-built ships with American crews. Limited competition allowed the few carriers serving Puerto Rico to charge very high rates, and McLean figured that Pan-Atlantic’s containers could easily grab market share. He figured without the longshoremen. When the first containership arrived from Newark, longshoremen in San Juan refused to unload the containers. Four costly months of negotiation ensued, with two ships sitting idle. Pan-Atlantic finally bent to union demands to use large, twenty-four-man gangs to handle containerships, and regular service opened in August. The delay, plus the cost of getting rid of the now obsolete tankers, drove McLean Industries dangerously into the red. A net loss of $4.2 million for 1958 nearly wiped out the earnings retained during the company’s first three years.7
McLean was not deterred. Pan-Atlantic’s problems, he determined, were rooted in the maritime industry’s passive, slow-moving culture. Domestic ship lines, such as Pan-Atlantic, operated in a highly regulated environment that left little room for entrepreneurial spirit. American-owned lines operating internationally, such as Waterman, were allowed to join international rate-making cartels. U.S.-flag ships, using American crews, had the exclusive right to carry the