The history of containers
Broadly the history of containers, as we know and use them today, can be classified into three major phases
• Phase 1: Invention and development of containers in the US in the 1950s
• Phase 2:the containerisation of global trade that effectively occurred in the 1970s
• Phase 3: The growth in scale of container usage with gradual globalisation as well as the export-oriented industrialisation of developed/developing countries in the 1990s & beyond.
The idea of some kind of ‘inter-modal’ transport system - so that a transport unit could be utilised for carrying goods on various forms of carrier – can be said to have emerged from the US railroads. This was in the 1950s, as mentioned above.
Motor vehicles had been carried in the Midwest of the USA on flatcars. More regularly and increasingly these flatcar services were utilised to ‘piggy-back’ freight trailers on railways. This trend occurred during the same period as some shipping lines were engaged in experimentation with containers, such as the ones moving between Seattle & Alaska.
In 1956, Malcolm McLean happened to sail a ship from Newark to Houston - with over 50 containers. This was on a converted tanker ship. The idea of goods - moving from one form of transport to another one - without the container being opened was indeed novel. It quickly caught on and soon revolutionised world trade.
