Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

Here, too, standardisation helped: by 1965, the International Standards Organisation had agreed a specification for shipping containers (8 feet wide, 8½ feet high, and 10, 20 or 40 feet long). Containers could be handled by ports the world over and rolled straight onto flat-bed trucks. And in March 1966, the first ships holding such containers departed the US.43 That first ship held 226 containers. A year later, a container ship holding 609 containers started to ply the seaway between Oakland on the west coast of the US and Cam Ranh Bay, an American military base in Vietnam. And these ships only got bigger. By 2020, the world’s largest container ship, the HMM Algeciras, fully laden, could hold 23,964 of the boxes.