How containerization shaped the modern world

(Music)

Everything is everywhere these days.

Check out the supermarket -- orange juice from China, nuts from India,

swordfish from Japan, lagers from Czechoslovakia,

scores of European cheeses.

You name it, it's there. Not when I was growing up.

You'd never taste a range of French cheeses

or Bohemian lager beer.

At least, you couldn't unless you were very rich

and could go anywhere when the fancy took you. All that has changed.

But it's not just foods. Got an iPhone?

Everyone knows it was invented and designed at Cupertino

in California, but who knows where

the complex bits and pieces of its innards are made or assembled?

Apple doesn't say.

The industry credits China, Japan, Germany, South Korea

and, of course, the United States itself.

Just think for a moment of the trillions of parts

and finished goods moving cheaply around the world

every second, a small portion by air,

but most by sea.

We call it globalization,

but the man who basically made globalization a reality in our lives

is too little known. This is his story.

The story of the man who makes your day.

In the Great Depression of the '30s,

when millions of Americans were out of work, worse than now,

Malcolm McLean was a 24-year-old truck driver.

He got a job to take cotton bales

from Fayetteville in North Carolina all the way

to a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey for shipping overseas.

He was glad of the work, but when he arrived

he got bored out of his mind, sitting in his truck

waiting and waiting and waiting on the docks

as the worker ants muscled crates and bundles off other trucks

and into slings that lifted the goods into the hold of the ship.

On board the ship itself,

with much yelling and arm waving,

the stevedores then unloaded each sling

and saw its contents placed in a designated position

in the hold.

Malcolm wasn't just bored, he was fuming.

His income depended on getting back to North Carolina

to pick up more loads in his truck.

Out of the frustration, inspiration struck.

Wouldn't it be great, he thought,

if my trailer could be lifted

and placed on the ship

without its cotton bales being touched. Yes, it would be great.

It would be revolutionary. For centuries,

general non-bulk cargo had been shipped in the process he watched.

It was called break bulk shipping.

Boxes, bales, crates handled piece by piece.

What Malcolm envisaged would have saved him only a day,

but it would have saved everyone else

something like two weeks in loading and unloading the ship.

On average, it was eight days

to haul and distribute break bulk shipments in the hold,

plus another eight days at the other end

to retrieve and distribute.

All that time would have been saved

if Malcolm McLean could have just driven his truck onto the ship

and at the other end, driven it off.

Well, today that concept is a reality.

The concept that occurred to Malcolm

is known as containerization.

It has done more than just save a great deal of time.

It's the reason why we have a thriving global marketplace,

offering us that infinite variety of things,

and it's the reason we can move cargo

from remote parts of the world at minimal cost.

Malcolm had his idea in 1937.

The 24-year-old truck driver sitting in his truck in Hoboken

was 40 before he did anything about it.

By then, he'd built his one truck

into a big trucking company. He borrowed money

from an enterprising vice president at Citibank in New York,

and set about designing the steel boxes and the decks of the ships

to carry them stacked one on top of another.

A lot of people thought he was crazy.

Inventors always attract armies of naysayers

who can never remember how critical they were.

For our part, we should remember Malcolm McLean.

His first container ship, the Ideal X,

sailed from Shed 154

at Marsh Street, Port Newark

with 58 well-filled boxes.

It was the beginning of the container era,

shrinking our world

and enlarging human choice.