The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

by Daniel Yergin

On April 26, 1956, cranes at the port of Newark, New Jersey, lifted up fifty-eight truck bodies, minus their wheels and cabins, and put them on a surplus World War II tanker bound for Texas. “We are convinced that we have found a way to combine the economy of water transportation with the speed and flexibility of overland shipment,” McLean announced. This was the beginning. By the early 1960s, containers were becoming a real business, with McLean and his company in the lead. No longer did shipments have to be broken down into boxes and crates and sacks and hoisted around by hordes of longshoremen, taking up many days in port and adding substantially to costs. Instead, packed into containers, they could be lifted by cranes, with the operator high above in a cabin, and moved between shore and ship. The world of longshoremen that had been depicted just a couple of years earlier in the 1954 film On the Waterfront was on its way out.