The History of Shipping Containers

People have been shipping cargo across the world for thousands of years, and the logistics of loading, unloading, and reloading products, has always proved to be time intensive, expensive and wasteful. The enormous rise in the number of cargo throughout the twentieth century meant that alternatives had to be found for the problems of cargo handling, which drive towards greater efficacy and cost-effectiveness led to the development of the intermodal freight systems that crisscross the world. The key to the progression of the very most efficient cargo handling system ever conceived, nevertheless, was the invention of the shipping container. Contrary to popular belief, the shipping container wasn’t devised by the Chinese. In fact, the very first delivery container design was patented in the us by Malcolm McLean1 in 1956. McLean was the person who owns the fifth largest trucking company in America, and he saw the truck loading and unloading process to be expensive due to its inefficiency. This caused his development of preloadable containers which can be set onto trucks as a device, considerably reducing handling time, and so costs. Early attempts at building this into a standardized system for freight management were unsuccessful until the U.S. Navy adopted the system, after which there is a general world-wide acceptance of the intermodal freight design from the early 70s. Since that time, the shipping container has continued to evolve with an ISO standard-size being decided to standardize the managing of containers worldwide. Other developments include the launch of new regular container sizes that have been designed specifically for ocean transport. The introduction of the 53-foot container in 19832 includes a 60% higher capability than a conventional ISO shipping container, and lets shippers to combine a greater amount of cargo into every dispatch, which in turn further raises the efficacy of the transportation technique overall. More modern developments have made shipping containers more secure and easier to monitor with using ISO reporting marks, which carry coded information about the master which can be followed from everywhere on earth. In recent years, the sturdiness of these ubiquitous containers has created them become popular for uses outside shipping, with many people purchasing them all to use for storage or for sheds, and in certain instances, even making homes from them. The usage of technologies like GPS is further developing the efficiency of using shipping containers, and continues to develop intermodal cargo as the most effective approach to transport most items around the globe today.