History of Containers

Many people think the Shipping Container was invented in China. …not true.

Mr. Malcolm Mc Lean- The Inventor of ISO Shipping Containers

The first shipping container was invented and patented in 1956 by an American named Malcolm Mc Lean. Mc Lean was not an ocean shipper, but was a trucker and by 1956 he owned the largest trucking fleet in the South and the fifth largest trucking company in all the United States.

He saved his money and bought his first truck in 1934. During those years all cargo was loaded and unloaded in odd sized wooden crates. The process was very slow and certainly not standardized.

After observing this slow and inefficient process for 20 years, he finally decided to step back and develop some standardized way of loading cargo from trucks to ships and warehouses.

Malcolm then purchased Pan Atlantic Tanker Company, which owned a bunch of fairly rusted tankers. He re-named the new shipping company Sea-Land Shipping. With this shipping company he could finally experiment with better ways to load and unload trucks and ships.

After many experiments, his final design is what we know now as the Shipping Container - super strong, uniform design, theft resistant, and easy to load, unload, truck, rail, ship, and certainly store.

In 1955 McLean sold his trucking company and then purchased Pan Atlantic Tanker Company, which he re-named as Sea-Land Shipping. With this shipping company he tried out better ways to load and unload trucks and ships. Before containerization, an infinite combination of sizes and shapes of boxes, crates and product were delivered by truck and trailer to a port. These were then loaded either directly or in large cargo nets into the hold, or onto the deck of a ship to be stowed and secure. Consequently, it cost about $5.86 a ton to load a ship. McLean’s innovation was to modify the ships and his terminals to handle only two or three standardized sizes of container.

Malcolm focused on transforming the way ships are loaded and by pioneering the use of standardized shipping containers, he transformed the cost structure of the shipping industry and so made possible today’s highly integrated global marketplace.

Thus all the costs involved in unloading trucks and trains at the ports and then loading and stowing the cargo on board the ships could be eliminated. After McLean’s revolution it only cost about $0.16 a ton to load a ship - a reduction of 97%. Without this revolution today’s global marketplace would not be a reality.