The Box - Marc Levinson [76]
Then Herbert Hall, the chair of the entire MH-5 process, intervened. Hall was a retired engineer at Aluminum Company of America, which made aluminum sheets used to manufacture containers. He had sparked the entire standardization process with a presentation to an engineering society in 1957. Hall knew little about the economics of using containers, but he was fascinated by the concept of an arithmetic relationship—preferred numbers, he called it—among sizes. He believed that making containers in 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot lengths would create flexibility. A shipper could put freight for a single customer in the most suitable size rather than wasting space inside a full 40-foot container. A truck equipped to handle a 40-foot container could equally well pick up two 20-foot containers (their precise length was 19 feet 10.5 inches, to make it easy to fit two together in a 40-foot space), or one 20- foot container and two 10-footers. Trains and ships would be able to handle combinations of smaller boxes in the same way. Hall’s enthusiasm was not shared by railroads and ship lines, because loading a train or ship with four 10-foot containers would cost four times as much as loading a single 40-footer. Hall reminded the task force that a higher body, the ASA’s Standards Review Board, would have to approve any proposed standards, and he opined that it would not accept the 12-foot, 17-foot, 24-foot, and 35-foot containers that the MH-5 subcommittee had endorsed. The 10-, 20-, and 40-foot lengths Hall favored were promptly approved, while the other lengths were deleted from the list of “standard” sizes. Those recommendations, along with the proposed 27-foot standard for the West and several standards for container construction, were sent to member organizations for a vote late in 1959.13
The standards Hall wanted stood to have huge implications for the transport sector. No ships or containers then in use or in design would fit into the container system of the future. Pan-Atlantic and Matson would face an unwelcome choice. If they agreed to use only 10-foot, 20-foot, and 40-foot containers, they would be forced to write off tens of millions of dollars of investment, much of it undertaken within the previous two years, and to shift to container sizes that they deemed inefficient for their own purposes. If Pan-Atlantic and Matson declined to adopt the standards, they would forfeit eligibility for government ship-construction subsidies, while their competitors would be able to build “standard” containerships partially at government expense. Either way, the latecomers to containerization would gain at the expense of the pioneers. Individual companies did not vote in the MH-5 committee, but companies’ interests were so disparate that more than a dozen of the industry organizations that did have voting rights failed to reach internal consensus. The proposed 27-foot regional standard was defeated, but the recommendation for Hall’s “modular” lengths met with large numbers of abstentions.14
Matters were so confused that Hall decided to organize a revote. This time, the questions about container construction were left off the ballot, which now had only a single question: should the association establish standard nominal dimensions 8 feet wide, 8 feet high, and 10, 20, 30, and 40 feet long? The 30-foot container had not been debated in the various task forces and subcommittees, but Hall added it in order to have “a definite relationship between the capacities of adjacent sizes” the fact that it appealed to Europeans worried about moving big containers through narrow city streets was an added attraction. Many steamship organizations abstained once again because ofinternal divisions, and again Marad backed the proposal. No vote count was released, but Hall, as chairman, decided that the 10-foot multiples had won sufficient support. On April 14, 1961, 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot boxes were declared to be the only standard containers. The Federal Maritime Board promptly announced that only containerships