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containers together could be secured with the twist of a handle. Pan-Atlantic threatened to bring suit against anyone infringing on its design, forcing other ship lines and trailer manufacturers to develop their own locks and corner fittings. This meant that, even if container sizes were standardized, Sea-Land’s cranes would not be able to lift Grace’s containers, and Sea-Land containers could never ride on Matson chassis. Railroads that carried the containers of various ship lines needed complicated systems of chains and locks to secure all of the different containers, because one simple locking system would not work for all. Agreeing on a standard corner fitting thus was crucial to making containers readily interchangeable. The obstacle was that every company had financial reasons to favor its own fitting. Adopting some other design would require it to install new fittings on every container, to buy new lifting and locking devices, and to pay a license fee to the patent holder.

An MH-5 task force had tried, and failed, to come up with a new design compatible with all existing corner fittings in 1961. Inevitably, the question arose: could any of the patented corner fittings serve as the U.S. standard? It could, Hall advised at an MH-5 meeting in December 1961, so long as it was in widespread use and was available to all for a nominal royalty. The task force chairman, Keith Tantlinger, had designed the Sea-Land fitting while working for Malcom McLean in 1955. He was now chief engineer at Fruehauf Trailer Company, and he offered royalty-free use of Fruehauf’s newest design, in which a steel lug slipped through the hole in a corner fitting and locked into place with a pin. Strick Trailers, a Fruehauf competitor, objected that the Fruehauf design was not good for coupling containers together, and, besides, it had not been proven in actual use. Strick’s own design, however, was mired in a patent dispute and could not be offered as a standard. National Castings Company threatened a lawsuit unless any new standard was compatible with its own system, which used lugs designed to spread apart when they passed through the hole in the corner fitting.

The technical differences between these systems were important, especially for ship lines. Containerships were hugely capital-intensive, and the industry’s viability depended upon minimizing port time and maximizing the time that each vessel was under way, earning revenue. The ship lines thus had special concern about “gathering,” the tendency of the lugs of the lifting device to position themselves in the holes in the corner fittings. If a fitting was poor at gathering when a crane lowered its spreader to pick up a container, the crane operator often had to raise the spreader and lower it a second time. Matson chief engineer Les Harlander calculated that if gathering difficulties added just one second to the average time required to lift a container, his company would lose four thousand dollars per ship per year. After a full day of debate, the subcommittee voted on the Fruehauf design and split badly. There was no ringing endorsement of a national standard.20

More meetings through 1962 failed to break the deadlock. Finally, Fred Muller, an engineer serving as the MH-5 committee’s secretary, offered a thought: since the Sea-Land corner fitting was working smoothly with the world’s largest fleet of containers, perhaps the company would be willing to release its patent rights. Tantlinger made an appointment with Malcom McLean. McLean had no reason to be fond of the American Standards Association, which only recently had excluded Sea-Land’s 35-foot containers from its list of standard sizes. Nonetheless, he understood that common technology would stimulate the growth of containerization. On January 29, 1963, Sea-Land released its patents, so that the MH-5 committee could use them as the basis for a standard corner fitting and twist lock.21

Agreement on a single design proved elusive. Various trailer manufacturers were still pushing their own products. Numerous ship lines and railroads