The Box - Marc Levinson [80]
The new era of freight transportation finally seemed to have arrived. In principle, land and sea carriers would soon be able to handle one another’s containers. Container leasing companies could expand their fleets in the knowledge that many carriers would be prepared to lease their equipment, and shippers could make use of containers without wedding themselves to a single ship line. “Projects awaiting the outcome of the fitting question are already underway,” a trade publication trumpeted within a few months of the vote in The Hague. “Container-handling hardware can now be designed with more certainty, and an increasing number of products designed to load and carry containers will be marketed.”26
The cart, however, had gotten ahead ofthe horse: the ISO container committee had agreed on what the corner fitting should look like without defining all of the loads and stresses it should be able to withstand. Starting in the autumn of 1965, dozens of ship lines and leasing companies began ordering containers with fittings based on the design that had worked for Sea-Land’s operations but had never been tested under other conditions. The ISO committee had yet to set maximum container weights, for example. No one could say how thick the steel in the fitting should be, because it was not clear how much weight it might have to hold. Sea-Land’s cranes lifted by connecting to the tops of the fittings in the top corners of a container; it was uncertain how the fittings would perform if a container were lifted from the fittings in the bottom corners. Railroads in Europe had different coupling systems from those in the United States, meaning that the cars in a train banged against one another with greater force, and the Sea-Land fittings and locks had never been subjected to such conditions. And what if five or six containers were stacked on the deck of a ship? In high seas, the stack of containers might tilt as much as 30 or 40 degrees away from vertical. Would the newly approved corner fittings and the twist locks connecting the containers survive such stresses?
Through 1966, engineers around the world tested the new fittings and found a variety of shortcomings. As an extra check, a container was put through emergency tests in Detroit, just ahead of another meeting of the ISO committee. It failed, the fittings on the bottom of the test container giving way under heavy loads. When TC104 convened in London in January 1967, it was faced with the uncomfortable fact that the corner fittings it had approved in 1965 were deficient. Nine engineers were named to an ad hoc panel and told to solve the problems quickly. They agreed on the tests that fittings would have to pass, and then two engineers, one British, one American, were sent to a hotel room with their slide rules and told to redesign the fitting so that it could pass the tests. Requiring thicker steel in the walls of each fitting, they calculated, would solve most of the problems. No existing container complied with their “ad hoc” design. Over the bitter complaints of many ship lines that had encountered no problems with their own containers, ISO approved the “ad hoc” design at a meeting in Moscow in June 1967. The thousands of boxes that had been built since ISO first approved corner fittings in 1965 had to have new fittings welded into place, at a cost that reached into the millions of dollars.27
The process of standardization was proceeding nicely. The economic benefit of standardization, however, was still not clear. Containers of 10, 20, 30, and 40 feet had become American and international standards, but the neat arithmetic relationship among the “standard” sizes did not translate into demand from shippers or ship lines. Not a single ship line was using 30-foot containers. Only a handful of 10-foot containers had been purchased, and the main carrier using them soon concluded that it would not buy more. As for 20-foot containers, land carriers hated them. Ship lines