The amazing shipping container: How it changed the world Keith Tantlinger has just died. He's someone you almost certainly haven't heard of and someone who – along with Malcolm McLean (no, not McLaren) – changed our world to the extent that it would have been almost unrecognisable to our forefathers. They also – if you want to squint at it – made the European Union redundant six …
By a significant amount. Weight is very rarely factored in, just container sizily e (20 or 40 ft). You can easily find a company that will ship you a 20ft container with all charges for less than 1k dollars... The main reason being is that export from europe is mainly to reposition empty containers in the far east, and to offset the cost of shipping empty containers. Most shipping lines are running their EU to far east exports at cost, or even a small loss.
There is a weight limitation on a container. It's about what you can put on a truck or a railway flatbed, but it is there. And again, it's the network, not just the ships, which is important. To get from any node, one where a lorry can pick up a container, to another node anywhere else, where a lorry can deliver a container.
And yes, I know about going east, used those prices to ship scrap metal around. Didn't want to get too complcated though....
Nice work Tim.
Sea trade always drives economics forward - case in point: Phonecian traders moving stuff around the Med were always at risk of storms, at which point the captain would tend to throw the nearest thing to hand over the side. To prevent one merchant losing everything, the merchants stocking the ship would agree that any losses would be shared collectively, and the first corporations were born.
... but I think you mean the first partnerships. Corporations were created a lot later so there would be a separate legal entity, meaning that a business going titsup didn't take out all of the proprietors and investors with it.
Great article. Looking into that Findlay and O'Rourke book now.
Spot on with that assesment.
And no...it WASN'T "Was it really free trade that screwed America?".
It was/is greedy corporations who won't pay a decent living wage to American workers...yet can reward their CEOs, & other top management, with obscene yearly compensation & bonus packages...whilst raping workers at their foreign plants.
What a country...NOT!
One other improvement the shipping container brought was security - it pretty much put an end to the 'shrinkage' which enhanced the dockers' lifestyle the world over. I seem to recall strikes over extra pay for handling containers which were not explicitly to make good this loss but that was certainly the implication.
BBC aired a fantastic documentary on this very subject a few months back, it was titled "The Box That Changed Britain" (and can still be viewed on BBC iPlayer)
The hidden parts of the story were brought to light, like how the container minimised damage and theft and greatly reduced insurance premiums, especially for Whiskey exporters.
However the dockers' trade unions didn't take too kindly the container as it reduced manpower, thus posed a threat to jobs and their refusal to unpack containers at the docks led to the UK's first inland container depot. Containers would be railed or trucked inland, where these massive boxes would be unpacked.
It was a very enlightening documentary indeed.
They also made the headlines a few years back in 2007 when the MSC Napoli ran aground and lost some of its containers which washed upon the shores of Dorset sparking a free for all..
A friend ran away to sea (I'm old enough to have friends who did that sort of thing) in the 60s and one export his ship carried was Gordon's gin. First crate to be "loaded" in UK was made up of half bottles. Cracked open and dockers all took their tax.
First crate unloaded in New York, half bottles again, for the longshoremen.
"Shrinkage" was so well known that everyone planned for it.
...and one that fascinated me. I encouraged my children to watch it too, to show them what things were like in Britain before containerised goods became common. I recall hearing about dockers' strikes in the early 1970s almost weekly, but once the mid 1970s had passed that too was a phrase that began to disappear as the container ports simply ignored the luddites and went round them.
If we're now looking at the collapse of the Euro, and perhaps the beginning of the unravelling of the EU, then that box that allowed the fruits of the manufacturing to be moved to China has a lot to do with it.
A classic case of the law of unintended consequences....
One cost that's not factored in is the cost of protecting the shipping lanes.
The English and Spanish paid mighty sums to build fleets to protect shipping. Shipping lanes are mostly safe today thanks to the massive naval fleets that patrol the world's oceans... with the notable exception of the horn of Africa. Without blanket protection, how much will shipping costs rise if shippers have to pay for protection?
And as China builds a more powerful navy, how will their projection of power affect shipping? Will we see more conflicts with neighboring countries, to the point of naval blockades?
Shipping is cheap as long as there's no loss to piracy or war.
I spent a fair bit of time cooped up in a small desolate town with an old gent that used to be in the merchant navy - and he recons it was shipping containers that changed the nature of a life at sea forever, for the worse.
You see, it used to have some romance and excitement - your ship would put into harbour, and they'd start to offload, then when that was done load the returning cargo. It was bags, and pallets, and holds full of dry goods to be pumped - it used to take days. In this time, the ship's officers and crew that were not on duty could go into town and take up in a whorehouse, or in this gent's case, spend a few days exploring somewhere exotic.
Then came containers - an entire large ship could be unloaded and loaded in a few hours, ready to sail on the next tide.
Sea life then became a dreary succession of weeks on the open water, a day in port, then back out into the blue.
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Sort of. Bear with me on this Tedious Link...
Containers revolutionised shipping. London dockers didn't like it and striked like it's 1969. Felixtowe, etc. ate their lunch. London docks withered on the vine. My Dad who had worked in the merchant navy and London shipping lost his job, had a nervous breakdown and eventually died at 60 - thanks a bunch Tatlinger. London Docklands Development Corp was formed. We got Canary Wharf, trendy docklands apartments, City Airport, Docklands Light Railway, and London became very attractive for shallow yet ambitious fast buck money grabbers to work in. Thatcher encouraged the "Me" attitude which persists to this day. Fred The Shed and his mates went too far. The rest is history.
US railroads have been doing a booming business in the last decade - some routes are actually maxed out. The reason? It is cheaper to offload Chinese containers in Long Beach, put it on a train to Charleston, and put it back on a boat to send it to Rotterdam than either to sail it through the Panama Canal or ship by train across Asia.
I heard that they were planning to increase the size of the Panama canal to be able to hold the supertankers and very large container ships that currently can't pass though it.
Of course, if the seas keep heating up, the northwest passage will be open year round and be a much, much shorter route to Europe.
At that point, at least the train traffic into the Port of Los Angeles will drop a bit.
Got a kick out of this - a lot comes into Oakland, CA too, then hops the train through Emeryville* to Chicago, to the East Coast, then to wherever.
*The kick is that I had to wait at a railroad crossing for 10 mins (again) this morning for an ~1mile train** to pass so that I could get to my desk which is all of about 50 feet from said train track
** You can estimate the lengths of these trains from their engine count. The short ones have 2, Ive seen ones that have 3-4 at the front and/or 2 at the back. The 5 engine trains, its quicker to take the 2 mile detour to get to the nearest bridge then back around than it is to do the 30 yards across the track into the car park.
Your title needs a caveat. "forever" ain't forever. The containers need dead dinosaurs to move them about (or, more worryingly, food oil converted into dead-dinosaur substitute).
The EU could have something of the last laugh, provided it doesn't tear itself apart through idiotic eurocrats planting their fingers in their ears and going "la la la la we can't see greece"...
Great article though. I'm geeky enough to have looked at the containers on the back of the artic chassis they ride on, and thought how the interlocks worked, and how they were loaded. Someone had to invent it, so good on him.
have been around since the 50s. They've never been able to compete commercially with fossil-fuel power, but watch this space. MVs typically burn the cheapest, nastiest form of fuel available - basically the scrapings after all the usable petrol/diesel/fuel oil/jet fuel has been extracted. The pipes that carry the fuel from the tanks to the engines have to be heated, otherwise the fuel remains solid.
Burning waste oil in steam ships might have been normal in the 50's when nuclear vessels were first proposed, but current container vessels are diesel, so use similar oil to that used in diesel trains and lorries, but much less per kilometre-tonne. True, the oil companies insist on selling the lines high sulphur diesel, but modern ships have all sorts of exhaust treatment built in. It would be to the bottom line's advantage to use cleaner fuel. Currently many ships are "slow steaming" (though few use steam) to save fuel. There is a big push to make container shipping even greener than it already is.
VietNam borders China yet these wondrous boxes are so cheap to manufacture they are not worth the return shipping costs by road, rail or sea if the distance is over 500 kilometres.
As with most every other country, there are piles of disused freight containers.
Five 40 foot containers, mounted on concrete pillars, sides cut and welded to form a large area forms the basement of my house for vehicles and storage. Cost under $1,200 + digging the hole, pouring the pillars and welding.
My mini-hotel is completely constructed from containers; the rooms are factory made modules that slide in. To make the ugly containers look nicer, I had expanded metal grid welded to the outside and sprayed with concrete.
Three containers will make a cosy, compact, economical home for two.
World trade is down at the moment, so there is a glut of containers and ships. During the good times, the Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers of containers have difficulty keeping up.
There is constant "wastage" of containers through damage, loss at sea and theft. There are whole villages in Africa made of containers, and we know we haven't sold any of ours there. (I work for a shipping line)
A container costs from $3000 dollars up, depending on size type and material, so a 3000 TEU vessel is carrying containers worth more than $10 million before you count the cost of the goods inside them.
Empty repositioning is the bugbear of the shipping industry. A few years ago there was a drastic shortage of containers on the West Coast US and they were running out of storage in the container yards on the East, because the flow of goods was eastward and no one wanted to pay to ship empty containers back by train.
Nowadays, if you want to ship something from Europe to the Far East, you only need to pay the port handling charges and the fuel costs, the line will basically carry it for free, just to get its empties back were they are needed, with someone else paying for the fuel. That is how recycling companies can afford to ship waste to China for sorting, rather than getting us to sort it at source.
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