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

One was scope: the width of a railroad track affected only railroads, whereas the design of containers affected not just ship lines, but also railroads, truck lines, and even shippers who owned their own equipment. The other difference was timing. Railroads had been around for several decades before incompatible track gauges came to be seen as a major problem. Container shipping was brand-new, and pushing standardization before the industry developed might lock everyone into designs that would later prove undesirable. From an economic perspective, then, there was every reason to doubt the desirability of the standardization process that began in 1958. If government agencies in those days had made it a routine practice to conduct cost-benefit studies, most likely the entire process of container standardization would never have begun.4