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had the job of getting a design developed. In late 1957, Matson engaged Trailmobile, a manufacturer of truck trailers, to build two prototype containers and two chassis. Another contractor constructed two lifting spreaders and a steel frame that would simulate a container cell within a ship. Months of testing followed. Gauges to measure strain were attached to the equipment, and the stresses were established as containers of various weights and densities were lowered into the cell, lifted out again, and placed on the chassis. The test cell was set at various angles to determine just how much clearance was needed between the containers and the vertical angle bars that formed the corners of the cell. Loaded boxes were stacked to measure the pressures on the bottom container, and lift trucks were run inside the containers to measure the strain on the floors.

When the results were in, Harlander’s team decided that the most economical size for Matson was feet high and 24 feet long, 11 feet shorter than Pan-Atlantic’s containers. The specifications took into account Weldon’s finding that each pound of weight saved was worth 20 cents, each additional cubic foot inside the container worth $20. To improve structural integrity, the roof would be a single sheet riveted in place rather than several panels attached with sheet metal screws, the design Trailmobile used for highway trailers. Steel corner posts would have to be able to support 120,000 pounds—the weight of several stacked containers, and much more than the posts in Pan-Atlantic’s first containers could support. The doors, two layers of aluminum with stiffeners between, were designed to dovetail rather than to meet in a straight line, to withstand twisting pressure due to a ship’s rolling in a heavy sea. The floor would be Douglas fir with tongue-and-groove joints. Special attachments to make the containers compatible with specific cranes and forklifts were ruled out on grounds of cost. “It takes very little in the way of extra features to add, say, $200 to the cost of a container,” Harlander commented. “There would be a marked change in the total profit picture if the equipment costs were, say, 10 percent higher than they need to be to do the job satisfactorily.”17

Early in 1958, as McLean was preparing to open Pan-Atlantic’s new route to Puerto Rico, the Pacific Coast Engineering Company (PACECO), the lowest of eleven bidders, won the contract to build Matson’s first crane. PACECO was not comfortable with the unusual design, and it declared that it would not be responsible for swinging containers, problems with the trolley, or difficulties working as fast as Matson specified. Harlander agreed that Matson would take responsibility for the design, and PACECO began work on an A-shaped monstrosity rising 113 feet from the dock, with legs 34 feet apart so that two trucks or two railcars could pass beneath the crane. Trailmobile built 600 containers and 400 chassis to Matson’s specifications. Matson developed a lashing system so that containers could be stacked up to five-high on deck, depending on their weight, without risk of damage at sea.18

Meanwhile, Weldon’s research department pursued its quest for optimality by investigating the most efficient way to use Matson’s fleet. Renting time on an IBM 704 computer at several hundred dollars a minute, the researchers built a fully fledged simulation model of the business, incorporating data on volume and costs for more than three hundred commodities at every port the company served at every time of year. Then they added in data on port labor costs, the current utilization of docks and cranes, and the load aboard each ship, to provide real-time answers to practical questions: Should a big Hawaii-bound ship call at Hilo and Lanai, or should it transfer its cargo to a feeder ship at Honolulu? What time of day should a vessel depart Honolulu so as to minimize total costs of delivering a load of pineapple to Oakland? Such simulations were new in the 1950s and had never been used in the shipping industry.19

Matson entered the container