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Actually the shipping container itself is pretty much high up there I guess. Pretty revolutionary for a box.
by dvirsky 7y ago
Actually the shipping container itself is pretty much high up there I guess. Pretty revolutionary for a box.
- hencq 7y agoYou might already be familiar with it, but I can heartily recommend the book The Box by Marc Levinson [1]. It describes how a simple idea of putting items in a container first, instead of directly on a ship, completely changed the world. It is for example the reason why Oakland and New Jersey eclipsed San Francisco and New York as ports. When Malcolm McLean, the inventor of the humble container, died in 2001, container ships all over the world, at an agreed moment, sounded their horns in tribute. [1] - https://g.co/kgs/vCK3nB https://g.co/kgs/vCK3nB
- ufmace 7y agoI was going to post the standardized shipping container myself. It was apparently a massive boost to transportation efficiency when the industry moved to a standard container that a single simple crane could rapidly load and unload from any ship and load onto a truck or railcar. It seems that, before this, most goods were transported in barrels or other one-off small containers loaded and unloaded from ships by manpower. Could take weeks to load and unload a ship.