"The Box"

[fiefoe]

Marc Levinson's account of the rise of the container was thorough but not exactly a page-turner. The radically different approaches by the two container shipping pioneers make interesting case-studies -- Matson's was improvisational, incremental; Pan-Atlantic used computer modeling (with punch cards!) and thought of everything from the start. Both kind of worked.

• Merchant marines, who had shipped out to see the world, had their traditional days-long shore leave in exotic harbors replaced by a few hours ashore at a remote parking lot for containers, their vessel ready to weigh anchor the instant the high-speed cranes finished putting huge metal boxes off and on the ship.
• The 11,000-mile trip from the factory gate (in Malaysia) to the Ohio warehouse can take as little as 22 days, a rate of 500 miles per day, at a cost lower than that of a single first-class air ticket.
• These savings in freight costs, in inventory costs, and in time to market have encouraged ever longer supply chains.
• Amphibious landing ships were recycled as "roll -on-roll off" vessels to transport trucks along the coast, improving upon techniques originally developed to land troops and tanks in over-the beach invasions.
• the most critical invention of all, the twist lock
• As Matson VP Norman Scott explained (when they were trying to decide on standard container sizes,) "In the economics of transportation, there is no magic in mathematical symmetry."
• Singapore's strategy (in 1966) was to use containers to become the commercial hub of Southeast Asia. .. It became a major transhipment point, with third-generation ships handing off containers to smaller vessels that shuttled them (to surrounding countries.)