The Box - Marc Levinson [79]
Back home, the engineers’ debate over the stresses and tolerances of corner fittings flared into a bitter commercial dispute. The National Castings corner fitting, an elongated box with two rectangular holes in the long side and a large square opening on the top, had been adopted by more container owners than had any other. One big company, Grace Line, had modern container cranes that operated on the National Castings system. Smaller lines that carried containers along with mixed freight in their breakbulk ships liked the National Castings fitting because the large openings let them use old-fashioned hooks for lifting and lowering. Changing to a different system would be expensive; Grace Line estimated the cost of replacing the corner fittings on its containers and the lifting frames on its cranes to be $750,000. National Castings sought wider support by agreeing to royalty-free use of its designs, although only for containers to be carried on American ships. The company persuaded the Maritime Administration that it should support the National Castings fitting as the international standard rather than a fitting based on the Sea-Land design.23
Four of the leading steamship lines, Sea-Land, Matson, Alaska Steamship, and American President Lines, fought back, because adoption of the National Castings fitting would have required them to change all of their containers. Instead, they proposed a minor change to the fitting that the MH-5 committee was designing based on the Sea-Land patent. If the hole on the top of the fitting were moved by half an inch, they estimated, 10,000 containers—about 80 percent of all large containers used by U.S. railroads and ship lines other than Sea-Land—would be “reasonably compatible” with Sea-Land’s. The fitting they recommended, they said, would cost less than half as much as the National Castings fitting ($42.24 versus $97.90) and weigh barely half as much (124 pounds versus 236). As the battle grew intense, the politics of standardization suddenly changed. National Castings Company was sold and abandoned efforts to promote its corner fitting. Marad, which had favored National Castings, reversed course and urged ship lines to accept whatever MH-5 agreed upon. Finally, an unusual decision came from the top. The American Standards Association’s Standards Review Board ignored the fact that the specialists on its MH-5 committee were still debating the finer details of corner fittings. On September 16, 1965, it approved a modified version of the Sea-Land fitting as the U.S. standard, just in time for the next meeting of the ISO container committee in The Hague.24
The sixty-one ISO delegates were offered two competing designs when they convened in the Dutch seat of government on September 19. The United States presented the modified Sea-Land corner fitting as the new U.S. standard, and the National Castings fitting was put forth as the British standard. The British quickly agreed that the American favorite was superior. Only one roadblock remained. ISO rules required that the documents supporting proposed standards had to be distributed four months in advance of a meeting. The MH-5 committee had made its recommendation only a few days earlier, and no technical documents were ready. The ISO committee voted unanimously to waive the four-month rule. Three high-ranking corporate executives—Tantlinger, Harlander, and Eugene Hinden of Strick Trailers—then retreated to a railcar factory in nearby Utrecht, where they worked with Dutch draftsmen for forty-eight hours nonstop to produce the requisite drawings. On September