Today in Tedium: It’s not often discussed, but one form of transportation can inspire another. Think about it. Before Orville and Wilbur Wright decided to test the skies, they (and other early fight enthusiasts) spent years learning the trade of bicycle repair. Robert Fulton developed the first practical submarine—and the first steamboat. Carriage makers attempted (and, honestly, failed) to translate their skill set from horses to railroads. But no example perhaps nails down this dynamic more perfectly than that of the container ship. On the surface, putting predetermined containers on giant freight ships seems like an obvious idea, but let’s be honest—it wasn’t. But systematizing the way we shipped complex goods was one of the smartest things the modern freight industry ever did—and it was a guy who had nothing to do with ships that came up with it. Today’s Tedium ponders the interesting, unusual story of the truck driver who saw a vision for ships that nobody else did—and the problems that ultimately created. — Ernie @ Tedium

Ships and trucks were Malcom McLean’s chocolate and peanut butter. (Wikimedia Commons)

Shipping containers: How software’s best metaphor evolved from shipping’s best idea

If you’re a developer or even modestly nerdy about technology, you probably are familiar with the concept of Docker and containerization. It’s the idea of being able to run a number of separate virtualized or abstracted computers inside a larger one.

Docker isn’t the first example of its approach—you have to look to FreeBSD’s “jails” concept for that one. But the decision to explicitly brand it around shipping containers, down to its logo, speaks to the conceptual brilliance of the shipping container.

Putting this in computer software terms: Traditionally, when you install an application, it sprays data around your computer. That can get terribly complicated to manage and can even degrade the performance of your operating system over time as multiple apps do the same thing. But by keeping that app together, it applies some operational consistency.

This explains why these sorts of organizing elements—be they Snaps, Pods, Flatpaks, or AppImages—have become so popular on Linux. While Docker (which is more focused on the server side of things than Snaps or Flatpaks are) works differently from most of those technically, it reflects a certain conceptual lineage.

Now apply this concept to physical cargo, and you can see the appeal. If you put 1,000 smartphones or 1,000 lawn chairs on a plane or ship, you don’t just leave them out loosey-goosey. That not only is harder to manage, it can also cost more, too, because there is more labor involved. And there’s always a risk that one shipment might get mixed up with another, causing serious problems.

Put simply, we needed a way to ensure that if a manufacturer had a product that they wanted to ship halfway across the world, it was left fully intact and untouched during the import process. That’s where the container comes into play.

And oddly enough, this idea came not from the world of ships, but the world of trucking—specifically from the owner of a trucking company who had spent his early career working around the limitations of his local market.

Malcom McLean—born Malcolm, but having removed the second L himself—essentially came to the trucking industry from nothing. He took interest in the delivery driver who dropped off oil to his Red Springs, North Carolina gas station, and made $5 for the task—not a small amount of money in 1933, the equivalent of $125 today. Eventually, he got access to a dump truck, which he then leased out—using the revenue from that to buy another truck. Within a few years, McLean had upgraded to shipping textiles, and within two decades, the firm had thousands of trucks to its name.

This may be the nicest profile I’ve ever seen of an individual. And he didn’t even get to the container ships part yet! (Journal and Sentinel/Newspapers.com)

In a fawning 1953 profile in his local newspaper, the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, writer Chester S. Davis explained why starting a trucking company in North Carolina, specifically, was a solution to a problem:

For the first 350 years of its history North Carolina has been crippled by inadequate transportation. Our coast is the most treacherous on the eastern seaboard. We have no first-rate natural harbors. Only one of our rivers—the Cape Fear—empties into the ocean. The others drain into shallow coastal sounds or, like the Yadkin-Pee Dee, flow into other states.

Combine that with the mountain terrain on the western part of the state, and you have a complicated state of affairs for getting goods into the state. Often, goods delivered by ship would have to go into a nearby port—such as the natural one in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region—to get delivered elsewhere.

North Carolina’s trucking industry grew quickly in the 1940s as a result, especially thanks to firms like the McLean Trucking Company, a firm that had expanded to 12 states at the time of the 1953 piece. Many firms in the sector started not unlike McLean’s. “The industry has been built out by a bunch of horny-handed characters who started out as truck drivers,” Davis wrote, McLean included.

But Malcom, as the piece states, had a vision. That vision was so broad and unexpected that there’s no way Davis could have known that in a decade, Malcom would own one of the largest maritime shipping concerns in the world. Not trucking—maritime.

And it comes down to a perception that nobody else was really considering—an idea he filed a patent application for just a year after the 1953 piece.

1955

The year that the shipping company Wallenius Line developed the first purpose-built “ro-ro” shipping freighter. This shipping use case, referring to “roll-on/roll-off,” was a type of freighter specifically for finished vehicles. The concept played a significant role in the globalization of the auto industry by making it possible to cost-effectively import cars to other parts of the world. While the cars are built a little more piecemeal today, if you’ve ever driven a Toyota imported from Japan, you have a ro-ro to thank for making that market possible.

Malcom McLean thought it’d be a great idea to combine shipping and trucking, and it resulted in this patent. (Google Patents)

How shipping containers reshaped the global freight industry

Tankers were already quite common in the 1950s, but they had a significant problem: They weren’t really designed to carry lots of different kinds of things. If a tanker was moving oil between coasts, there wasn’t really room for anything other than oil.

This was inefficient for multiple reasons: For one thing, if you were delivering oil from one port to another, it’s not like the tanker was going to bring oil back with it—that’s not how oil works. That meant a return trip was a function of sheer location and was otherwise completely fruitless.

Compare this to trucking—when McLean’s crew delivered textiles up north, they often brought something back with them. What if you could apply this thinking to ships?

TFW when your Jenga blocks are supersized.

And so, that’s what McLean did with U.S. patent 2,853,968, “Apparatus for Shipping Freight.” The strategy was simple: Rather than having trucks deliver freight that could be placed on a ship to travel globally, you put the truck bed itself onto the ship. The tankers, many of which had been used in World War II, were large enough to hold dozens of them, and the scale meant the ships could carry literal tons of freight—per container.

Plus, containers are strong enough to make the transition in one piece, literally—and by treating them like building blocks, they become even stronger structurally. Per the patent filing:

The containers are of sturdy construction capable of withstanding the forces to be encountered on the open seas and are adapted to receive the freight to be trans ported. In a specific, and particularly advantageous, embodiment of my invention, hereafter more specifically described, each container may be of a construction adapted to receive a complete truck-trailer fully loaded with freight.

The construction is such that two rows of containers are formed. Preferably, the containers of one row are in side by side relation with each other and in end to end relation with the adjacent containers of the other row. Thus, the long sides of the containers are protected from direct impact from high seas by adjoining containers and in the case of the four end containers their outer sides are protected by the forecastle or poop deck structure as the case may be.

There are lots of other advantages, too: It didn’t require significant redesigns of existing ships, and by placing the containers atop the ship, it could suddenly make single-purpose ships multifunctional. Plus, it prevented containers from getting lost—like the items on a plate destined for a picky eater, everything’s kept separate.

Soon after filing this patent, McLean resigned from his position with McLean Trucking Company and founded a replacement company. Within a couple of years, McLean had launched a company, Sea-Land, and a ship of his own to test out the idea. He set up deliveries from New Jersey to Houston to prove to skeptical shipping firms that he wasn’t crazy. Not only did the idea work, but it worked swimmingly well.

About 15 years later, McLean would make another exit from a company he built—except this time it was a company worth mid-nine figures, not low-eight.

When the SS Ideal-X launched, modified to allow more containers to sit on the top, little did McLean know that he was about to fundamentally change an industry. And not always for the better.

“I’d like to sink that sonofabitch.”

— Freddy Fields, an official with the International Longshoremen’s Association, responding to the departure of the SS Ideal-X out of Newark, New Jersey, on its initial voyage. Fields, perhaps earlier than most, realized that containers were going to threaten a lot of jobs, because containers don’t need their goods removed manually in most cases, and that was kind of what longshoremen did. It’s hard to argue in favor of a crew of people doing 20-plus hours of back-breaking work, when you can just Lincoln-Log it in a couple of minutes.

The problem with containerization is that we’re too good at it. (-tarat-/Flickr)

Containerization was a huge boon for shipping—but it came with real human costs

Fans of ruthless efficiency will find a lot to like about the story of shipping containers. They not only simplified a complex process, but they made shipping a much more cost-effective tool for product globalization.

There are likely many things in your home that spent time on a freighter before they landed in your hands, and it’s because shipping suddenly became cost-effective—pennies on the dollar compared to what it was previously.

But there’s a lot of complication that comes with the model, and much of it falls on longshoremen. As a 1978 Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the longshore industry put it:

The advent of container technology in the early 1950s and competitive pressures to cut costs and improve productivity led management to initiate innovative approaches in the use of cargo handling equipment and work processes.

It became a huge point of contention in many labor battles, as the added efficiency came at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs globally, along with a gradual decline in rights for the workers that remained. Numerous work stoppages followed.

And it’s not like things have gotten much better since. As a 2022 piece from The American Prospect noted, recent deregulations in the container industry have increased the sizes of ships while creating additional complexity at ports. In the example they shared, a crew of Filipino seafarers found themselves stuck at sea for more than a year—but also stuck at the Long Beach port for months, all because the port was too full.

An ad for Sea-Land after a longshoremen’s strike around Baltimore. The ad ran the same year Sea-Land sold to R.J. Reynolds.

There is some irony to this, as McLean had basically come up with the shipping container idea specifically to cut down on unnecessary delays. As Ian Graham wrote in his book Fifty Ships That Changed the Course of History:

During Thanksgiving Week in 1937, McLean accompanied a cargo of cotton to New York and watched it being loaded on board a ship bound for Istanbul, Turkey. As the days went by, he grew increasingly frustrated by the delays. Since shipping companies couldn’t predict how long the process would take and therefore exactly when a ship would leave one port and arrive at its next port, they had to deliver their cargo to port facilities days or even weeks before it was due to be loaded onto a ship, increasing the chance that some of it might be lost, damaged or stolen. Vast warehouses were needed to store goods at ports, and the process was so labor-intensive that it was also very expensive.

Essentially, you might argue that McLean’s simple idea worked so well that it actually created a situation where those delays are happening during the drop-off process.

Compare the number of containers on McLean’s ship with the number of containers on the Ever Given, the ship that infamously got stuck in the Suez Canal a few years back.

Though to be completely fair to McLean’s great idea, it was somewhat sabotaged by deregulation, which arguably made it almost too popular. From Amir Khafagy’s American Prospect piece:

Prior to the 1980s, the Shipping Act of 1916 regulated the relatively modest ocean carrier industry like a public utility. Prices were transparent and there were no exclusive agreements for volume shippers; anyone wanting to ship cargo could access the same rates. The United States Shipping Board, later the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC), regulated prices and practices, and subsidies assisted domestic shipbuilding. The act enabled smaller companies to enter ocean shipping with stable prices to weather downturns.

But the Shipping Act of 1984, and later the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 1998, took down this architecture. It allowed shipping companies to consolidate, and eliminated price transparency, facilitating secret deals with importers and exporters. The FMC was defanged as a regulator. Almost immediately, containerization took off. The number of goods carried by containers skyrocketed from 102 million metric tons in 1980 to about 1.83 billion metric tons as of 2017.

This essentially created our modern economy of cheap stuff delivered cheaply from around the world. But it also created chaos in the form of bad labor conditions and a significant shift in terms of what the shipping industry needed from longshoremen and seafarers alike. Plus, the ships—and the ports!—had to keep changing to accommodate the puzzle pieces that Malcom McLean invented. They were LEGOs with consequences.

Putting this back in computer terms, because those are the open seas I’m familiar with: Docker is great for compartmentalizing self-hosted apps. But the truth of the matter is, every computer has a ceiling of how many containers it can manage. Some can handle one or two, others 20 or 30.

But eventually, there’s a limit, a point where things can topple over because there’s just too much stuff. But it’s a mushy limit, one that you will only find after testing the waters and finding that you’re starting to boil the ocean. Containerization is such a good idea, in a shipping context, because it turned an expensive, time-consuming shipping process into a cheap one.

But like the stuff on your computer, it’s not immune to enshittification. And eventually, the stuff wants to break out of the container.

Malcom McLean was obviously a brilliant guy whose brilliant invention has been used in less-than-brilliant ways. But I definitely would not go so far as a 2021 piece from a North Carolina news radio station did: “Did a North Carolinian Cause the Suez Canal Back-Up?”

Find something you love as much as Chester S. Davis loved writing massive features about Malcom McLean for the Winstom-Salem Journal and Sentinel. This one is from 1969. (Newspapers.com)

That’s a bit too butterfly-effecty even for me, the king of connecting disparate things together. (He’s dead now, but presuming there’s an afterlife, it probably grinds McLean’s gears that the Suez Canal incident shows just how far containerization strayed from his original idea.)

But I do think it highlights a deeper point: Innovation in the hands of an industry that sees unlimited upside means that there will always be unforeseen problems. This is an issue with industries big and small, but it’s especially acute in logistics, a field where the work never ends and there’s always a threat of burnout.

To get a little personal for a second, my dad worked in shipping logistics. He managed freight that went out of an airport, and I remember he always worked the most insane hours. Gone by 6, home by 10. It became clear at some point that burnout hit him hard, and the adjustment to a sense of normalcy after multiple years of 18 hour days really did a number on him.

He died young. I officially outlived him last year.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about burnout lately, and how difficult it is to recharge the batteries. (I’m feeling some of it myself, but I’m trying.) I’ve never worked in logistics beyond organizing Docker containers, but I do think logistics are a great lens to look through the weaknesses of business culture and the labor movement at large.

There is potential to follow an idea too perfectly, too far, too much to its absolute extreme, and see the returns diminish over time. But fortunately, writing doesn’t really require a lot of extra deliveries.

–

Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal!

Need a box in your life that won’t go anywhere? Check out our sponsor la machine, the ultimate example of an Ultimate Machine. Invented by an AI pioneer, but no AI in sight.