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By Root 964 0

“have designed, especially in their 20-foot equipment, a highly efficient port to port container without due consideration of how the box would move efficiently from port to customers,” an executive of the New York Central Railroad complained. So far as truck lines were concerned, the bigger the container, the more freight could be transported per hour of driver labor. Trucking companies’ preference was revealed by the truck trailers they chose to buy, almost none of which had 20-foot bodies. Hall’s notion of coupling two 20- foot containers together on a single trailer proved to be impractical, because if each container was filled to its weight limit, the combined weight would violate highway regulations in every state. Towing two 20-foot containers in tandem was impractical as well, because the same truck could move more weight by pulling two 24-footers or, in many states, two 27-footers.28

The most powerful evidence against the international standards came from the marketplace. Despite the U.S. government’s pressure on carriers to use “standard” sizes, nonstandard containers continued to dominate. Sea-Land’s 35-foot containers and Matson’s 24-footers, all a nonstandard 8 feet 6 inches high, accounted for two-thirds of all containers owned by U.S. ship lines in 1965. Only 16 percent of the containers in service complied with the standards for length, and a good number of those were not of standard 8-foot height. Standard containers clearly were not taking the industry by storm. The large ones were too hard to fill—too few companies shipped enough freight between two locations to require an entire 40-foot container—and small ones required too much handling. As Matson executive vice president Norman Scott explained, “In the economics of transportation, there is no magic in mathematical symmetry.”29

Their business success notwithstanding, Sea-Land and Matson had reason to worry about the drive for standard-size containers. Both companies had raised tens of millions of dollars of private capital to buy equipment and convert their ships to carry containers, and so far neither had sought federal construction subsidies. That situation was now changing. By 1965, both Sea-Land and Matson were preparing to expand internationally, and they might want subsidies to build new ships. In addition, Marad dispensed other types of aid. It gave operating subsidies to U.S. ship lines sailing international routes, to compensate for the requirement that they employ only high-wage American seamen, and it enforced regulations giving U.S.-flag vessels “preference” to carry government cargo overseas. If Marad were to limit those subsidies only to companies adhering to the “voluntary” MH-5 standards, Sea-Land and Matson would be at a serious competitive disadvantage. Executives from the two companies met in Washington and decided to join forces to fight the U.S. government.30

They started back at the American Standards Association. The association’s MH-5 committee had been quiescent, but in the fall of 1965, with the ISO beginning to adopt international standards for containers, the MH-5 committee named a new subcommittee to look at “demountable containers”—the sort that could be moved among ships, trains, and trucks. The chairman was Matson chief engineer Harlander, and now, in contrast to 1961, Sea-Land officials were prominent participants. At the first meeting, at the Flying Carpet Motel in Pittsburgh, Harlander surrendered the chair and made an appeal for Matson’s 24-foot container size to be accepted as standard. He was followed by Sea-Land’s chief engineer, Ron Katims, who called for the subcommittee to recognize 35-foot containers as well. Sea-Land’s containers, the subcommittee was told, tended to hit weight limits long before they were filled to physical capacity, so 40-foot containers would not in practice hold more freight than 35- footers. With the longer size, however, Sea-Land would not be able to fit as many containers on each ship, forfeiting almost 1,800 tons of freight capacity per vessel. Harlander then called for the subcommittee