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

by Marc Levinson

Renting time on an IBM 704 computer at several hundred dollars a minute, the researchers built a fully fledged simulation model of the business, incorporating data on volume and costs for more than three hundred commodities at every port the company served at every time of year. Then they added in data on port labor costs, the current utilization of docks and cranes, and the load aboard each ship, to provide real-time answers to practical questions: Should a big Hawaii-bound ship call at Hilo and Lanai, or should it transfer its cargo to a feeder ship at Honolulu? What time of day should a vessel depart Honolulu so as to minimize total costs of delivering a load of pineapple to Oakland? Such simulations were new in the 1950s and had never been used in the shipping industry.