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concluded that vans of 20 to 25 feet would be most efficient in the Hawaii trade: larger containers would travel with too much empty space, while containers shorter than 20 feet would require too much loading time. They recommended that Matson start out by carrying containers on deck, as Pan-Atlantic had, with conventional breakbulk cargo in the holds. By converting six of its fifteen C-3 cargo ships to carry containers on deck, Matson would be able to offer weekly container service between Honolulu and both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Weldon found that this arrangement would be profitable even if the container business stayed small. If the business grew, the company could convert additional ships to carry only containers. Containerization, he concluded, “would appear to present the fortunate circumstance of a promising initial course of action offering the option of going as far as desired and stopping at any point that prudent planning dictates.”13

Matson management accepted Weldon’s recommendations in early 1957. Leslie Harlander, a newly minted naval architect, was put in charge of the engineering. Harlander was told to hire a staff and begin detailed planning for every aspect of a container operation. He was given clear guidance to be careful about money. Every choice had to be justified based on whether it offered a higher return on investment than the alternatives.14

Harlander and his brother Don, an engineer who specialized in cranes, began to lay out their requirements for cranes in July 1957. In October, they went to Houston to observe the first arrival of Pan-Atlantic’s newly rebuilt Gateway City. The Gateway City was a C-2 ship, slightly smaller and slower than the World War II-vintage C-3s in Matson’s fleet, and it was equipped with Sea-Land’s two novel shipboard cranes. With both cranes working, the Gateway City’s turnaround time was no longer than that of the much smaller Ideal-X. As the Harlanders saw firsthand, though, the shipboard cranes had shortcomings. Pan-Atlantic’s two crane drivers each sat high above the deck facing two colored lights. A green light told one driver that he could move the crane trolley over the side of the ship to deposit a container on the dock, while a red light told the other driver to wait. If both cranes accidentally dangled forty-thousand-pound containers over the side at the same time, the unbalanced weight could capsize the vessel. Matson, with plans to serve only a small number of large ports rather than many small ones, had no need to put up with this risk. The first big decision was an easy one: land-based cranes were the way to go.15

These would not be leftover cranes adapted from some other use like the cut-down shipyard cranes Pan-Atlantic had pressed into service in 1956. The original Pan-Atlantic cranes were revolvers, known in a shipping trade as “whirleys.” They did well enough at picking up a container from the deck of a ship and swinging it in an arc toward the dock, but their design made it difficult to lower the container precisely atop a trailer chassis, which slowed down the entire operation. Matson’s cranes were designed from scratch, with a requirement that they be able to unload an incoming container and load an outgoing box within five minutes—a cycle two minutes shorter than that of Pan-Atlantic’s first cranes. The Matson cranes were to have booms that stretched ninety-five feet from the dock, more than enough to span the entire width of the ships in Matson’s fleet. The operator would control a trolley to move the lifting beam out over the ship, lower the lifting beam to pick up a container, hoist the container, and then travel toward the dock at speeds up to 410 feet per minute. At high speed, these movements would have left each container swinging from the long hoist cables, far above the deck. Les Harlander designed a special lifting spreader to solve the swing problem, testing its feasibility by building a model with his son’s Erector Set over Christmas of 1957.16

Weldon’s work had concluded by recommending a container 20 to 25 feet long. Harlander