SIMIC

IN the last week of April, the shipping community remembered the invention of the shipping container, one of the biggest milestones in modern maritime history, noted Fort Lauderdale's Maritime Executive.

"On April 26, 1956, the first commercial containership, the Ideal X, made its maiden voyage from Newark to Houston. It was a culmination of a revolutionary business idea by the trucking tycoon Malcolm Mclean, who at the time was looking to develop a low-cost freight business.



Mr Mclean's journey in the logistics industry began in 1934, when he formed the Mclean Trucking Company as a sole driver moving gasoline to a service station he managed in Red Springs, North Carolina.



By 1950, McLean Trucking had become one of the largest transport companies in the US, with annual revenues of US$15 million, according to shipping expert John McCown, a close confidant, who wrote "Giants of the Sea" chronicling the container story.



Mr McLean's vision for efficient shipping was hatched some time in 1937, after he spent hours at an export hub in Hoboken, New Jersey waiting for his full truckload of cotton bales to be unloaded.



"As he waited for hours, he watched each truck pulled alongside the ships and gangs of men first unloaded the truck and then placed the goods in cargo nets to be winched onboard the vessel," recounted Mr McCown.



"He saw that a similar process in reverse was occurring on the ship. The same slow, laborious process unfolded with one truck after another. Mr McLean was struck by the inefficiency he was witnessing."



Inspired by the observations he made at Hoboken, Mr McLean set out to overhaul the laborious breakbulk shipping that existed at the time. He believed there was a tremendous cost benefit to be realised by efficiently moving full loads of cargo.



This would lead Mr McLean to acquire Waterman Steamship Corporation in 1955, a shipping company based in Alabama. He wanted to leverage the company's subsidiary Pan-Atlantic Steamship as a suitable platform to implement his idea of moving truck trailers on vessels.



He then begun conversion of T-2 tankers into container vessels. One of the tankers built in 1945, originally named Potrero Hills, then renamed Ideal X after conversion, became the first manifestation of Mr McLean's idea of container shipping.



The Ideal X had been converted to carry 58 containers on deck and still had capacity to carry 15,000 tons of petroleum cargo in the tank holds. Malcolm wanted 33 foot long by eight foot wide containers, as at the time these were the dimensions allowed with highway trailers in the US.



The International Standards Organisation would later standardise the shipping container in 1968 to the dimensions of 20 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet high. Forty-foot and 53-foot containers are now standard as well.