Ask a hundred people what they believe to be the modern world’s most impactful inventions, and you’ll get a hundred different answers. The lightbulb. The smartphone…
Ask a hundred people what they believe to be the modern world’s most impactful inventions, and you’ll get a hundred different answers. The lightbulb. The smartphone. Antibiotics. Coffee.
Allow me to propose a completely different answer: The shipping container.
None of those previous answers get very far without the humble shipping container. It’s what you’re wearing. It’s what you’re sitting on. It’s the coffee in your mug and the phone in your pocket. It all spent time in a shipping container.
70 years ago this month, the invention that would come to reshape both the world’s economy and our region’s landscape was put into motion on the shores of Port Newark. It was all thanks to a trucker who was getting impatient.
Malcom McLean, right, and other dignitaries marked the world's first container ship service on the shores of Port Newark in April 1956. Courtesy of the Containerization and Intermodal Institute.
For centuries, loading a ship meant workers using their hands: hauling individual crates, boxes, bales and barrels from ship to shore and back again. It took days, cost a fortune, and as you might expect, sometimes stuff went missing.
North Carolina truck driver Malcom McLean spent years watching this lumbering
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