The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

by Marc Levinson

Contrary to what had been thought at first, the handling of containers led to hardly any cost savings,” an influential European maritime expert admitted. A 1955 census found 154,907 shipping containers in use in non-Communist Europe. The number is large, but the containers were not: fully 52 percent of them were smaller than 106 cubic feet, less than the volume of a box 5 feet on a side. Almost all European containers were made of wood, and many had no tops; the user piled the goods inside and covered the load with canvas—hardly an efficient system for moving freight. The containers promoted by the Belgian national railway were meant to be slid up a ramp to fit inside truck bodies, requiring an extra stage of handling. American containers were typically made of steel, providing better protection but at enormous cost; one-quarter or more of the weight of a loaded container was the container itself.27