The Box - Marc Levinson [72]
The United States Maritime Administration decided in 1958 to put an end to this incipient anarchy. Marad, as it was known, was an obscure government agency, but it held enormous power over the maritime industry. Marad and a sister agency, the Federal Maritime Board, dispensed subsidies to build ships, administered laws dictating that government freight should travel in U.S.-flag vessels, gave operating subsidies to U.S. ships on international routes, and enforced the Jones Act, the venerable law dictating that only American-built ships, using American crews and owned by American companies, could carry cargo between U.S. ports. The wide variety among containers increased its financial risk: if a ship line took Marad’s money, built a vessel to carry its unique containers, and then ran into financial problems, Marad could end up foreclosing on a ship that no one would want to buy. Marad’s desire to set common standards was supported by the navy, which had the right to commandeer subsidized ships in the event of war and worried that a merchant fleet using incompatible container systems would complicate logistics. The situation was urgent: several ship lines were seeking subsidies to build vessels to carry containers, and if standards were not set quickly, each carrier might go off in its own direction. In June 1958, Marad named two committees of experts, one to recommend standards for container sizes and the other to study container construction.
The problems the committees faced were not entirely novel. The railway industry, for example, had gone through a standardization process. The gauge—the distance between the inside faces of a pair of rails—on North American railroads varied between 3 feet and 6 feet during the nineteenth century. Trains on Britain’s Great Western Railway, with a gauge of 7 feet, could not travel on lines with the most common British gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches. In Spain, gauges varied from 3 feet 3.3 inches to 5 feet 6 inches, and the multiplicity of gauges in Australia foreclosed long-distance rail transport well into the twentieth century. In some cases, the gauge had been chosen more or less randomly. In others, builders deliberately sought to prevent their line from interconnecting with others that might compete for traffic. Over time, these differences worked themselves out. The Pennsylvania Railroad took over lines in Ohio and New Jersey after the Civil War and converted them to its own gauge. When Prussia proposed a railway link to the Netherlands in the 1850s, the Dutch narrowed their lines so that trains could run through from Amsterdam to Berlin.2
The railway precedent suggested that ship lines might eventually make their container systems compatible without a government dictate. Yet the analogy is misleading. The gauge that became “standard” on railways had no particular technical superiority, and standardization had almost no economic implications; the width of the track did not determine the design of freight cars, nor the capacity of a car, nor the time required to assemble a train. In the shipping world, on the other hand, individual companies had strong reasons to prefer one container system to another. The first carrier with fully containerized ships, Pan-Atlantic, used containers that were 35 feet long, because that was the maximum allowed on the highways leading to its home base in New Jersey. A 35-foot container would have been inefficient for carrying canned pineapple, Matson Navigation’s biggest single cargo, because a fully loaded container would have been too heavy for a crane to lift; Matson’s careful studies showed that a 24-foot box was best for its particular mix of traffic. Grace Line, which was planning service to Venezuela, worried about South America’s mountain roads and opted for shorter, 17-foot containers. Grace’s design included small slots at the bottom for fork-lifts, but Pan-Atlantic