IF a lesson is to be drawn from Marc Levinson's book, The Box, it is that sensible decisions at one point of human development make no sense few months later when conditions change and make fools of us all.
Such is the story of The Box, a book that would make a good present for someone this time of year, and easily available at Amazon.
You can suck up to a boss by buying him his own, enjoy heft of this tome when batting an ignorant junior – in the spirit of education, of course.
If you find yesterday's wisdom is often today's foolishness, then you will find many examples of this in The Box book.
For example, to take advantage of cheap oil, containerships were made fast, then to be outmoded when the 1973 oil shocks hit.
And just as slow steaming settled in, an oil glut made that silly, only to be revived again to save money in the global downturn.
This book traces container history back to its ill-fated start as a railway idea in the 1920s. They were then adopted in a small way in America and even spread to the UK, France and Australia.
Devised to beat the truck, then siphoning off freight from the short-haul rail business, containers faded away in the 1930s Depression and did not re-emerge until after World War II, despite enjoying success in countering the trucker threat.
Even then, American container development was influenced by federal regulation, which was surprisingly complex even in the 1920s, having been around since the 1880s with the creation of Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), since renamed the Surface Transportation Board.
To moderate railway competition, the ICC has always insisted on a single rate per commodity, though with the advent of rail containers, demands arose for a weight-based rate.
After such preliminaries, The Box book soon becomes the story of Malcom (no second L, please) McLean, the father of ship-to-shore containerisation, as we know it.
In 1934, at the age of 22, he started his single-truck McLean Trucking Company in Maxton, North Carolina.
It would take him more than 20 years before his first containership made its maiden voyage in 1956 between Newark, New Jersey and Houston, Texas with 58 containers, which in those days, were truck trailer bodies without chassis.
Hamstrung by fresh regulations in the 1935 Motor Carrier Act, truckers like McLean could only carry commodities with rates and routes fixed by the ICC.
A trucker licensed to carry paper from A to B was not permitted to bring back cable spools. Not surprisingly, there was much chafing in the industry.
In Europe, containers have also existed, but were only employed from 1951 as part of a short-sea cabotage in Denmark by a brewery supplying its own pubs along the coast.
Thus, it was McLean's historic voyage in 1956 between Newark and Houston that marked the start of common carrier containerisation.
McLean had been trucking since the 1930s and bought a decrepit firm contiguous to his operations for the regulatory purposes. This enabled him to expand. This became his practice and what he could not buy, he leased.
Source : TCSM, 22.05.10.
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