The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

by Marc Levinson

  A task force of the dimensions subcommittee convened on September 16, 1959, and its chairman, E. B. Ogden, announced that it was desirable to revisit the question of container length. All but two eastern states now permitted 40-foot trailers, Ogden said, so the length limit that had justified 35-foot boxes no longer existed. In the West, eight states had increased their length limits to permit trucks to pull two trailers of 27 feet each, rather than 24 feet apiece. Ogden, whose Consolidated Freightways was the country’s largest truck line, urged the committee to approve 27-foot containers as a regional standard size for the West, to reduce costs for trucking companies.

  Then Herbert Hall, the chair of the entire MH-5 process, intervened. Hall was a retired engineer at Aluminum Company of America, which made aluminum sheets used to manufacture containers. He had sparked the entire standardization process with a presentation to an engineering society in 1957. Hall knew little about the economics of using containers, but he was fascinated by the concept of an arithmetic relationship—preferred numbers, he called it—among sizes. He believed that making containers in 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot lengths would create flexibility. A shipper could put freight for a single customer in the most suitable size rather than wasting space inside a full 40-foot container. A truck equipped to handle a 40-foot container could equally well pick up two 20-foot containers (their precise length was 19 feet 10.5 inches, to make it easy to fit two together in a 40-foot space), or one 20- foot container and two 10-footers. Trains and ships would be able to handle combinations of smaller boxes in the same way. Hall’s enthusiasm was not shared by railroads and ship lines, because loading a train or ship with four 10-foot containers would cost four times as much as loading a single 40-footer. Hall reminded the task force that a higher body, the ASA’s Standards Review Board, would have to approve any proposed standards, and he opined that it would not accept the 12-foot, 17-foot, 24-foot, and 35-foot containers that the MH-5 subcommittee had endorsed. The 10-, 20-, and 40-foot lengths Hall favored were promptly approved, while the other lengths were deleted from the list of “standard” sizes. Those recommendations, along with the proposed 27-foot standard for the West and several standards for container construction, were sent to member organizations for a vote late in 1959.13

  The standards Hall wanted stood to have huge implications for the transport sector. No ships or containers then in use or in design would fit into the container system of the future. Pan-Atlantic and Matson would face an unwelcome choice. If they agreed to use only 10-foot, 20-foot, and 40-foot containers, they would be forced to write off tens of millions of dollars of investment, much of it undertaken within the previous two years, and to shift to container sizes that they deemed inefficient for their own purposes. If Pan-Atlantic and Matson declined to adopt the standards, they would forfeit eligibility for government ship-construction subsidies, while their competitors would be able to build “standard” containerships partially at government expense. Either way, the latecomers to containerization would gain at the expense of the pioneers. Individual companies did not vote in the MH-5 committee, but companies’ interests were so disparate that more than a dozen of the industry organizations that did have voting rights failed to reach internal consensus. The proposed 27-foot regional standard was defeated, but the recommendation for Hall’s “modular” lengths met with large numbers of abstentions.14

  Matters were so confused that Hall decided to organize a revote. This time, the questions about container construction were left off the ballot, which now had only a single question: should the association establish standard nominal dimensions 8 feet wide, 8 feet high, and 10, 20, 30, and 40 feet long? The 30-foot container had not been debated in the various task forces and subcommittees, but Hall added it in order to have “a definite relationship between the capacities of adjacent sizes” the fact that it appealed to Europeans worried about moving big containers through narrow city streets was an added attraction. Many steamship organizations abstained once again because ofinternal divisions, and again Marad backed the proposal. No vote count was released, but Hall, as chairman, decided that the 10-foot multiples had won sufficient support. On April 14, 1961, 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot boxes were declared to be the only standard containers. The Federal Maritime Board promptly announced that only containerships designed for those sizes could receive construction subsidies.15

  The standards wars were by no means over. In fact, they had barely begun. At American urging, the International Standards Organization (ISO), which then had thirty-seven nations as members, agreed to study containers. At the time, only very small containers were being shipped across borders, but bigger ones obviously were on the way. The ISO project was meant to establish worldwide guidelines before firms made large financial commitments. Delegates from eleven countries, and observers from fifteen more, came to New York in September 1961 to start the process. Most were appointed by their governments, with the United States, represented by the American Standards Association, being an exception. The United States, as the convener of the meeting, held the chair.16

  ISO’s practice, wherever possible, was to decide how a product must perform rather than how it should be made. This meant that ISO Technical Committee 104 (TC104) would focus on making containers easily interchangeable, not on the details of construction. TC104 was thus able to avoid prolonged debate between proponents of steel containers, popular in Europe, and advocates of the aluminum containers more common in America. No standard would dictate aluminum or steel. TC104 established three working groups and began what would inevitably be a slow-moving process, with many interests involved. The American Standards Association’s MH-5 subcommittees continued work on other domestic standards, with the hope that whatever they agreed would later be accepted by ISO. Many leading U.S. transport engineers were involved simultaneously in both groups.17

  The wrangling over container sizes, which had consumed three years in the United States, was now repeated at the international level. By 1962, much of Europe was allowing larger vehicles than was America, so the new American standard sizes, 8 feet high, 8 feet wide, and 10, 20, 30, or 40 feet long, faced no technical obstacles. Economic interests were another story. Many continental European railroads owned fleets of much smaller containers, made for 8 or 10 cubic meters of freight rather than the 72.5 cubic meter volume of a 40-foot container. The Europeans wanted their containers recognized as standard. The British, Japanese, and North American delegations were all opposed, because the European containers were slightly wider than 8 feet. A compromise was struck in April 1963. Smaller containers, including the European railroad sizes and American 5-foot and -foot boxes, would be recognized as “Series 2” containers. In 1964, these smaller sizes, along with 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot containers, were formally adopted as ISO standards. Not a single container owned by the two leading containership operators, Sea-Land Service (the former Pan-Atlantic) and Matson, conformed to the new “standard” dimensions.18

  While one set of ISO subcommittees and task forces was hashing out dimensions, other groups of experts were seeking common ground concerning strength requirements and lifting standards. In both North America and Europe, small containers were often moved with forklifts, and some had eyes on the top through which longshoremen or railroad workers could insert hooks connected to winches. The larger containers introduced in North America had steel fittings at each corner, which were welded to the corner post, to a top or bottom rail running the length of the container, and to cross-members running across the front or back end. The corner fittings were cast with holes, through which the containers could be lifted, locked to a chassis, or connected to one another. These castings were simple to make, costing about five dollars apiece in 1961.19

  The problem came with the lifting and locking devices that fit into the holes. Pan-Atlantic, the first out of the gate, had applied for a patent on its particular system, which used conical lugs that could slip through the oblong holes of its corner fittings and automatically lock into pl
ace; a double-headed device to hold two containers together could be secured with the twist of a handle. Pan-Atlantic threatened to bring suit against anyone infringing on its design, forcing other ship lines and trailer manufacturers to develop their own locks and corner fittings. This meant that, even if container sizes were standardized, Sea-Land’s cranes would not be able to lift Grace’s containers, and Sea-Land containers could never ride on Matson chassis. Railroads that carried the containers of various ship lines needed complicated systems of chains and locks to secure all of the different containers, because one simple locking system would not work for all. Agreeing on a standard corner fitting thus was crucial to making containers readily interchangeable. The obstacle was that every company had financial reasons to favor its own fitting. Adopting some other design would require it to install new fittings on every container, to buy new lifting and locking devices, and to pay a license fee to the patent holder.

  An MH-5 task force had tried, and failed, to come up with a new design compatible with all existing corner fittings in 1961. Inevitably, the question arose: could any of the patented corner fittings serve as the U.S. standard? It could, Hall advised at an MH-5 meeting in December 1961, so long as it was in widespread use and was available to all for a nominal royalty. The task force chairman, Keith Tantlinger, had designed the Sea-Land fitting while working for Malcom McLean in 1955. He was now chief engineer at Fruehauf Trailer Company, and he offered royalty-free use of Fruehauf’s newest design, in which a steel lug slipped through the hole in a corner fitting and locked into place with a pin. Strick Trailers, a Fruehauf competitor, objected that the Fruehauf design was not good for coupling containers together, and, besides, it had not been proven in actual use. Strick’s own design, however, was mired in a patent dispute and could not be offered as a standard. National Castings Company threatened a lawsuit unless any new standard was compatible with its own system, which used lugs designed to spread apart when they passed through the hole in the corner fitting.

  The technical differences between these systems were important, especially for ship lines. Containerships were hugely capital-intensive, and the industry’s viability depended upon minimizing port time and maximizing the time that each vessel was under way, earning revenue. The ship lines thus had special concern about “gathering,” the tendency of the lugs of the lifting device to position themselves in the holes in the corner fittings. If a fitting was poor at gathering when a crane lowered its spreader to pick up a container, the crane operator often had to raise the spreader and lower it a second time. Matson chief engineer Les Harlander calculated that if gathering difficulties added just one second to the average time required to lift a container, his company would lose four thousand dollars per ship per year. After a full day of debate, the subcommittee voted on the Fruehauf design and split badly. There was no ringing endorsement of a national standard.20

  More meetings through 1962 failed to break the deadlock. Finally, Fred Muller, an engineer serving as the MH-5 committee’s secretary, offered a thought: since the Sea-Land corner fitting was working smoothly with the world’s largest fleet of containers, perhaps the company would be willing to release its patent rights. Tantlinger made an appointment with Malcom McLean. McLean had no reason to be fond of the American Standards Association, which only recently had excluded Sea-Land’s 35-foot containers from its list of standard sizes. Nonetheless, he understood that common technology would stimulate the growth of containerization. On January 29, 1963, Sea-Land released its patents, so that the MH-5 committee could use them as the basis for a standard corner fitting and twist lock.21

  Agreement on a single design proved elusive. Various trailer manufacturers were still pushing their own products. Numerous ship lines and railroads had started to buy containers, albeit in small numbers, and they employed a wide variety of lifting systems. Lack of consensus meant that the U.S. delegates did not have an official design to offer when the ISO container committee met in Germany in October 1964. The Americans promoted the Sea-Land fitting as the basis for a potential international standard, with Tantlinger distributing half-size ceramic models to show other delegates what it looked like, but no design was put to a vote.22

  Back home, the engineers’ debate over the stresses and tolerances of corner fittings flared into a bitter commercial dispute. The National Castings corner fitting, an elongated box with two rectangular holes in the long side and a large square opening on the top, had been adopted by more container owners than had any other. One big company, Grace Line, had modern container cranes that operated on the National Castings system. Smaller lines that carried containers along with mixed freight in their breakbulk ships liked the National Castings fitting because the large openings let them use old-fashioned hooks for lifting and lowering. Changing to a different system would be expensive; Grace Line estimated the cost of replacing the corner fittings on its containers and the lifting frames on its cranes to be $750,000. National Castings sought wider support by agreeing to royalty-free use of its designs, although only for containers to be carried on American ships. The company persuaded the Maritime Administration that it should support the National Castings fitting as the international standard rather than a fitting based on the Sea-Land design.23

  Four of the leading steamship lines, Sea-Land, Matson, Alaska Steamship, and American President Lines, fought back, because adoption of the National Castings fitting would have required them to change all of their containers. Instead, they proposed a minor change to the fitting that the MH-5 committee was designing based on the Sea-Land patent. If the hole on the top of the fitting were moved by half an inch, they estimated, 10,000 containers—about 80 percent of all large containers used by U.S. railroads and ship lines other than Sea-Land—would be “reasonably compatible” with Sea-Land’s. The fitting they recommended, they said, would cost less than half as much as the National Castings fitting ($42.24 versus $97.90) and weigh barely half as much (124 pounds versus 236). As the battle grew intense, the politics of standardization suddenly changed. National Castings Company was sold and abandoned efforts to promote its corner fitting. Marad, which had favored National Castings, reversed course and urged ship lines to accept whatever MH-5 agreed upon. Finally, an unusual decision came from the top. The American Standards Association’s Standards Review Board ignored the fact that the specialists on its MH-5 committee were still debating the finer details of corner fittings. On September 16, 1965, it approved a modified version of the Sea-Land fitting as the U.S. standard, just in time for the next meeting of the ISO container committee in The Hague.24

  The sixty-one ISO delegates were offered two competing designs when they convened in the Dutch seat of government on September 19. The United States presented the modified Sea-Land corner fitting as the new U.S. standard, and the National Castings fitting was put forth as the British standard. The British quickly agreed that the American favorite was superior. Only one roadblock remained. ISO rules required that the documents supporting proposed standards had to be distributed four months in advance of a meeting. The MH-5 committee had made its recommendation only a few days earlier, and no technical documents were ready. The ISO committee voted unanimously to waive the four-month rule. Three high-ranking corporate executives—Tantlinger, Harlander, and Eugene Hinden of Strick Trailers—then retreated to a railcar factory in nearby Utrecht, where they worked with Dutch draftsmen for forty-eight hours nonstop to produce the requisite drawings. On September 24, 1965, the ISO delegates approved the American design as the international standard for corner fittings.25

  The new era of freight transportation finally seemed to have arrived. In principle, land and sea carriers would soon be able to handle one another’s containers. Container leasing companies could expand their fleets in the knowledge that many carriers would be prepared to lease their equipment, and shippers could make use of containers without wedding themselves to a single ship line. “Projects awaiting the outcome of the fitting question are already underway,”
a trade publication trumpeted within a few months of the vote in The Hague. “Container-handling hardware can now be designed with more certainty, and an increasing number of products designed to load and carry containers will be marketed.”26

  The cart, however, had gotten ahead ofthe horse: the ISO container committee had agreed on what the corner fitting should look like without defining all of the loads and stresses it should be able to withstand. Starting in the autumn of 1965, dozens of ship lines and leasing companies began ordering containers with fittings based on the design that had worked for Sea-Land’s operations but had never been tested under other conditions. The ISO committee had yet to set maximum container weights, for example. No one could say how thick the steel in the fitting should be, because it was not clear how much weight it might have to hold. Sea-Land’s cranes lifted by connecting to the tops of the fittings in the top corners of a container; it was uncertain how the fittings would perform if a container were lifted from the fittings in the bottom corners. Railroads in Europe had different coupling systems from those in the United States, meaning that the cars in a train banged against one another with greater force, and the Sea-Land fittings and locks had never been subjected to such conditions. And what if five or six containers were stacked on the deck of a ship? In high seas, the stack of containers might tilt as much as 30 or 40 degrees away from vertical. Would the newly approved corner fittings and the twist locks connecting the containers survive such stresses?

  Through 1966, engineers around the world tested the new fittings and found a variety of shortcomings. As an extra check, a container was put through emergency tests in Detroit, just ahead of another meeting of the ISO committee. It failed, the fittings on the bottom of the test container giving way under heavy loads. When TC104 convened in London in January 1967, it was faced with the uncomfortable fact that the corner fittings it had approved in 1965 were deficient. Nine engineers were named to an ad hoc panel and told to solve the problems quickly. They agreed on the tests that fittings would have to pass, and then two engineers, one British, one American, were sent to a hotel room with their slide rules and told to redesign the fitting so that it could pass the tests. Requiring thicker steel in the walls of each fitting, they calculated, would solve most of the problems. No existing container complied with their “ad hoc” design. Over the bitter complaints of many ship lines that had encountered no problems with their own containers, ISO approved the “ad hoc” design at a meeting in Moscow in June 1967. The thousands of boxes that had been built since ISO first approved corner fittings in 1965 had to have new fittings welded into place, at a cost that reached into the millions of dollars.27