The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

by Marc Levinson

The railway precedent suggested that ship lines might eventually make their container systems compatible without a government dictate. Yet the analogy is misleading. The gauge that became “standard” on railways had no particular technical superiority, and standardization had almost no economic implications; the width of the track did not determine the design of freight cars, nor the capacity of a car, nor the time required to assemble a train. In the shipping world, on the other hand, individual companies had strong reasons to prefer one container system to another. The first carrier with fully containerized ships, Pan-Atlantic, used containers that were 35 feet long, because that was the maximum allowed on the highways leading to its home base in New Jersey. A 35-foot container would have been inefficient for carrying canned pineapple, Matson Navigation’s biggest single cargo, because a fully loaded container would have been too heavy for a crane to lift; Matson’s careful studies showed that a 24-foot box was best for its particular mix of traffic. Grace Line, which was planning service to Venezuela, worried about South America’s mountain roads and opted for shorter, 17-foot containers. Grace’s design included small slots at the bottom for forklifts, but Pan-Atlantic and Matson chose not to pay extra for slots because they did not use forklifts. Each company deemed the fittings it used to lift its containers the best for loading and discharging ships at top speed. Conform...