The Box - Marc Levinson [75]
The sister Marad committee, dealing with container construction and fittings, worked more smoothly. Members readily agreed that each container should be able to carry the weight of five fully loaded containers atop it, with the weight to be carried on the corner posts rather than on container walls. All containers should be designed to be lifted by spreader bars or hooks engaging the top corners. Rings on top for lifting by hooks or slots underneath for forklifts would be acceptable, but not mandatory. Those decisions gave engineers the basic criteria to use in designing new containers. The committee also recommended that each ship be designed with various sizes of steel cells so that it could carry multiple sizes of containers. With that, the two Marad committees scheduled no further meetings.11
Meanwhile, yet another player entered the standards business. The National Defense Transportation Association, representing companies that handled military cargo, decided that it, too, would study container dimensions. The effort’s chief proponent was a brash entrepreneur named Morris Forgash, who had built the United States Freight Company into a $175-million-a-year business over two decades by picking up small lots of cargo from various shippers, consolidating them into truck trailers or containers, and shipping the trailers cross-country by rail. The outspoken Forgash impelled his committee to reach consensus quickly. By late summer of 1959, it had agreed unanimously that “standard” containers would be 20 feet or 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8 feet high. The other lengths approved by the MH-5 and Marad committees, and the 8#-foot-high boxes supported by some truckers and most ship lines, would not be acceptable for military freight—a decision Forgash’s committee was able to reach only because no one from the maritime industry was involved. No matter: individual companies’ preferences, Forgash asserted, would have to yield to the need for uniformity. “Even if we reach the goal slowly, we must have a goal,” he said. “Otherwise, obsolescence will overtake us all if each man is his own engineer.”12
With the MH-5 subcommittee and the Marad dimensions committee having adopted one set of “standard” sizes, and with the National Defense Transportation Association having approved another, the wheeling and dealing began at the American Standards Association. Under the ASA’s normal procedures, the February 1959 subcommittee recommendation to designate six “standard” sizes would have been sent for a mail ballot among all participating organizations. The vote never occurred. Instead, insiders set to work to change the recommendations.
A task force of the dimensions subcommittee convened on September 16, 1959, and its chairman, E. B. Ogden, announced that it was desirable to revisit the question of container length. All but two eastern states now permitted 40-foot trailers, Ogden said, so the length limit that had justified 35-foot boxes no longer existed. In the West, eight states had increased their length limits to permit trucks to pull two trailers of 27 feet each, rather than 24 feet apiece. Ogden, whose Consolidated Freightways was the country’s largest truck line, urged the committee to approve 27-foot containers as a regional standard size for the West,