The Box - Marc Levinson [83]
Two controversies remained. The MH-5 committee undertook a futile effort to make containers compatible with airplanes as well as with ships, trucks, and trains. The requirements were not easy to reconcile: air containers needed to be stronger than maritime containers, and they required smooth bottoms to travel on conveyor belts rather than corner fittings for lifting by cranes. After months of studies, it dawned on the engineers that shippers paying a premium for the speed of air freight would be unlikely to want their cargo carried in ships, and a separate standard was developed for air containers. Railroads raised a more serious problem, contending that containers needed heavier end walls. End walls bore no great loads when the containers were on ships, but the braking of a train could cause the end of a container to bump up against the end of the flatcar. Railroads in North America demanded end walls twice as strong as those needed by ship lines, to reduce the potential for damage claims. European railroads were even more concerned, because differences in couplings caused more forceful contact between railcars in Europe. Maritime interests resisted stronger end walls, which meant more weight and higher manufacturing costs. With the TC104 committee on their side, the railroads won the day, but not without cost; by one estimate, the requirement for stronger end walls added one hundred dollars to the cost of manufacturing a standard container.36
By 1970, as the International Standards Organization prepared to publish the first full draft of its painstakingly negotiated standards, the bitter battles among competing economic interests were finally winding down. In hindsight, the process can be faulted in almost every particular. It led to corner fittings that were too weak and needed redesign. Several newly approved container sizes were uneconomic and were soon abandoned. The standards for end walls may have been excessive, and the standards for lashing containers together on deck never quite added up. No one would declare that all of the subcommittees and task forces came up with an optimal result.
Yet after 1966, as truckers, ship lines, railroads, container manufacturers, and governments reached compromises on issue after issue, a fundamental change could be seen in the shipping world. The plethora of container shapes and sizes that had blocked the development of containerization in 1965 gave way to the standard sizes approved internationally. Leasing companies began to feel confident investing large sums in containers and moved into the field in a big way, soon owning more boxes than the ship lines themselves. Aside from Sea-Land, which still used mainly 35-foot containers, and Matson, which was gradually reducing its fleet of 24-foot containers, almost all of the world’s major ship lines were using compatible containers. Finally, it was becoming possible to fill a container with freight in Kansas City with a high degree of confidence that almost any trucks, trains, ports, and ships would be able to move it smoothly all the way to Kuala Lumpur. International container shipping could now become a reality.37
Chapter 8
Takeoff
The Ideal-X and the Hawaiian Merchant were small-scale demonstrations of the container’s potential. The Gateway City, in 1957, and the Hawaiian Citizen, in 1960, offered powerful examples of the efficiency that container shipping could achieve once specialized