The Box - Marc Levinson [39]
By then, Matson had moved to phase two of the plan that Weldon had laid out at the start of 1957. The Hawaiian Citizen, another C-3 freighter, was modified to carry containers stacked six high and six abreast in its holds as well as on its deck. Four vertical steel angle bars, attached to the ship’s structure, were installed to constrain each stack of containers within the holds. At the top of each angle bar, a large steel angle helped guide the containers as the crane lowered them into place. The hatches were expanded so that every stack of containers was accessible to the crane, making the hatch covers so large, 52 feet by 54 feet, that the crane would have to lift them out of the way before starting work on the containers beneath. One of the five holds was outfitted with a cooling system and electrical hookups for refrigerated containers, and lights in the engine room gave warning if the temperature within any of the 72 refrigerated containers was too high or too low. After the hold was loaded and the hatch covers put into place, additional containers could be stacked two-high atop the covers, giving the ship a capacity of 408 25-ton containers. Maintaining stability was a constant problem, especially on heavily loaded runs to Hawaii; when necessary, Matson solved this by organizing the containers before loading so that the heaviest would go at the bottom of each stack, lowering the vessel’s center of gravity.
The $3.8 million conversion was completed in six months, and in May 1960 the Hawaiian Citizen began sailing a triangular route between Los Angeles, Oakland, and Honolulu. When the vessel arrived in port, the longshoremen first removed the lashings from the deck containers. The crane lifted the deck containers onto chassis pulled by transporters, which took them to the marshaling yard for onward shipment. Once the deck was clear, the crane lifted the hatch covers over one row and unloaded the first cell, occupied by a stack of six containers. The crane then switched to two-way operation. A transporter pulling an outbound container would pull beneath the crane, alongside one with an empty chassis. Every three minutes, the hoist would dive into the ship, lift an arriving container, move it to the waiting chassis, then pick up the outbound container from the other chassis and return to the ship. As it finished each row, the crane would move along the dock to position the boom directly over the next row. Instead of spending half its time in port, like other ships, the Hawaiian Citizen was able to spend twelve and a half days of each fifteen-day voyage at sea, making money. Matson’s cautious directors were so pleased that they agreed to spend $30 million for containerships by 1964.21
By now, everyone in the close-knit maritime industry was talking containers. The talk, however, far outstripped the action. Aside from Matson in the Pacific and Pan-Atlantic, now renamed Sea-Land Service, on the Atlantic coast, very few ship lines were putting containers to routine use. Carriers needed to replace their war-era fleets, but they were afraid to do so at a moment when the shipping industry seemed to be on the cusp of technological change.
It was easy enough to conclude that containers would change the business, but it was not obvious that they would revolutionize it. Containers, said Jerome L.