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

For McLean, though, the real triumph came only when the costs were tallied. Loading loose cargo on a medium-size cargo ship cost $5.83 per ton in 1956. McLean’s experts pegged the cost of loading the Ideal-X at 15.8 cents per ton. With numbers like that, the container seemed to have a future.28