Malcom McLean wanted to increase productivity, and ended up revolutionizing the shipping industry. In 1937 McLean, working for his family trucking business, became frustrated after spending all day at Hoboken, New Jersey, waiting for dockworkers to empty his truckload of cotton and load it aboard ship. McLean thought how much easier it would be simply to take his entire trailer, contents and all, and just hoist it aboard. Years later he turned that vision into reality by inventing the intermodal shipping container, the big box that has changed the way goods are shipped around the world. But he contributed much more than a big box, ingenious as it was. He also created an entire freight container system, ships and all, that speeds cargo through ports, aboard ships, and over highways and railroads.

He was not the first person to understand that reusable containers made shipping easier and more efficient, nor the first to put a system into practice. In 1835 a shipping agent in Pittsburgh, John O’Connor, had designed reusable wooden boxes to speed the transfer of cargo from the boats of the Pennsylvania Canal to flatcars transporting freight over the Allegheny Mountains. The boxes carried a ton of freight and were transferred between boats and flatcars by a wooden gantry crane.

In the 1920s Graham Brush and Joseph Hodgson of New York’s Ward Steamship Line formed the Over-Seas Railways Corporation and designed a ship that could carry up to 100 standard railway boxcars. By swinging the loaded boxcars aboard from dockside with a specially designed crane, the system eliminated the inefficient and revenue-draining “break-bulk” process that transferred cargo from boxcars to ships. In 1929 Brush and Hodgson shipped their first cargo from New Orleans on a run to Havana aboard a vessel that carried 93 boxcars. The Seatrain Lines service they started continued into the 1950s, but eventually changes in boxcar size and opposition from large railroads that saw Seatrain as competition brought the company to an end. Nevertheless, Brush and Hodgson’s system had demonstrated the vast economic potential of containerized shipping.

By then McLean owned one of the country’s largest trucking companies, and he remained eager to reduce his costs by confining his trucks to local trips while employing ships for the long hauls. In 1955 he hired engineer Keith Tantlinger to design a trailer body that could be detached from its chassis and piled in stacks aboard ships. McLean eventually settled on a 35-foot length, the same size as his semitrailers, and built with steel frames so they could be stacked five deep. Tantlinger designed the corner posts with sockets on each end. A handling device called a spreader had cone-shaped twist locks on each corner that could be lowered to the box’s top sockets and turned to lock in place. Portable devices with twist locks on each end fastened the containers to each other in a stack.

But that was only part of the equation. The containers also had to fit aboard ships. McLean acquired a small steamship company that he renamed Sea-Land Industries and then developed a steel frame to hold containers on the top decks of his tankers. In April 1956 cranes loaded McLean’s first test platform, the oil tanker Ideal X , at Port Newark, New Jersey, with detachable containers from truck-drawn semitrailers lined up along the dock. Four days later the Ideal X arrived in Houston and reversed the process—a voyage marking the dawn of modern-day containerization.

McLean modified three more tankers, but experience showed him that he needed to ship at least 200 containers per voyage to make a profit, more than his tankers could carry. In due course, he bought a small freighter and turned it into the world’s first cellular containership. Launched on October 4, 1957, the Gateway City could carry 226 35-foot-long containers, stacked five high in steel racks called cells and two high on the top deck. Because few ports boasted cranes capable of handling such massive objects, the Gateway City carried two of her own, specially designed to move along the ship’s length on tracks and to extend over the dock for loading or unloading. As container shipping grew in popularity, ports began installing permanent cranes that made the heavy and expensive shipboard cranes unnecessary.

On November 23, 1958, an article in the New York Times compared the Gateway City’s productivity to that of a comparable conventional cargo ship on the New York-to-Houston route. Forty-two dockworkers took 14 hours to offload 226 containers from McLean’s ship at Houston and reload the same number for the return trip. An equivalent conventional ship required the services of 126 workers, who labored for 84 hours. “A ship earns money only when she’s at sea,” reflected McLean. “Where costs rise is in port. The quicker you can get back to sea, the more money you keep.”

Containerized shipping vastly increased productivity, but it required standardization before it could be widely used. With that goal in mind, McLean made Sea-Land’s patents available royalty-free to the International Standards Organization (ISO). The ISO set the outside dimensions of containers at 10, 20, and 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8 feet high, later adding 8½- and 9-foot heights. Ironically, it did not include McLean’s 35-foot containers, which meant that Sea-Land had to convert a number of its cellular ships.

Sea-Land began service on the North Atlantic routes in 1966. By the end of the decade, its 27,000 containers and 36 container ships were serving 30 ports. In 1969 the R. J. Reynolds Company bought Sea-Land for $530 million. McLean received $160 million for his share and retired.

Containerized shipping continued to flourish in the last quarter of the 20th century, as more than 18 million containers made an estimated 200 million trips a year. Today more than 90 percent of the world’s trade goods travel by container, and the number and capacities of container ships have steadily increased. New seaports with towering cranes lining their docks sprang up around the world, using the twist-lock system to move and stack intermodal containers from semitrailers and rail flatcars. In the 1980s new flatcars began transporting double-stacked 20- and 40-foot containers coast to coast on the “land-bridge” service, which was faster and more cost-efficient than shipping containers on vessels through the Panama Canal.

McLean died at the age of 87 on May 25, 2001. Tributes poured in from shipping industry executives worldwide, but there was one mark of respect that stood out from the rest. All over the world, cargo ships sounded their whistles to honor “the father of containerization” on the day of his funeral. The company he founded, which merged with a Danish corporation to become the Maersk Line, is still the world’s largest container shipping business.