The Box
In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about. Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe.--From publisher description.
Stats for nerds
53recommend
79mentions
63people
2010–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Let's see it last. It won't. This is just a short-term private endeavor/vanity-press project. Just because a business uses a "sustainable technology" does not make it a sustainable business. Comparing cargo ships to airplanes is apples vs. oranges and reveals the author's deliberate "headline" motivation and lack of technology understanding compared to the actual ground truth of shipping.
Until fuel prices change for the long-term and/or emissions regulations have an order of magnitude uptick as well as covering far more than sulfur (see IMO 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020 ), there will be zero economic incentive to use wind-power over diesel/bunker-fuel power.
And no, any advantages of docking at smaller ports are defeated by those ports having less land-transit access and we already have fleets of (smaller) cargo vessels serving these ports at insanely low $/ton/mile rates.
Just like farms, all of the economics point to larger vessels, larger ports, and operating entity consolidation. See "The Box" by Marc Levinson https://a.co/d/0gtBkWwt or watch a few "What's Going On With Shipping" https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping videos.
It will take some sort of global political or environmental catastrophic externality to even budge, let alone change, the status quo.
- No, US longshoremen lost that jobs battle decades ago, Some got settlements that lasted for life, but there were no more new longshoremen. There's a good writeup of this in "The Box", a history of the shipping container by Marc Levinson.
The Port of San Francisco stopped being a freight port because of containerization. A new container port was built in Oakland, using dirt and rock excavated for BART construction. San Francisco lost its freight rail service, and the railroad yard became the Mission Bay development. The San Francisco Belt Railroad closed in 1992. There used to be freight trains on the Embarcadero.
Something similar happened in London. A small non-union port on the east cost of Britain became the main container port, and container ships never made it to London. Not that they'd fit in the Thames River anyway. No more London dock workers.
In container ports, "by hand" means cranes and big forklifts. "Automated" means very few people in the container areas at all.
Port of Antwerp, 2015.[1] That's real, but sped up.
- That history of the bank of Vernal was fascinating, thank you for sharing. Parcel post offered for packages of up to 50 pounds + price charged to post parcels from Salt Lake City to Vernal being less than half the cost charged by private carriers ==> lots of freight to Vernal starts getting sent by post! Then, bank director wanting pressed bricks for the front the new bank building in Vernal + closest pressed brick manufacturer to Vernal being in Salt Lake City + post still the cheapest freight option to Vernal ==> 37.5 tons of pressed bricks packed into 50 pound crates and posted!
Anyone interested in the history of freight & trade may also enjoy reading Marc Levinson's book "The Box" about the shipping container. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...
- https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...
> The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author Marc Levinson
ISBN: 9780691170817
Chapter six is most relevant to your inquiry
- The Box by Marc Levinson is the incredible story of the dawn of containerized shipping.
It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong time.
The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other concerns (like delivery speed).
- list of (most of) the books mentioned in this thread so far. I tried reading every comment but used chatGPT instead.
1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom.
2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins.
3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software.
4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries.
5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician.
6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery.
7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis.
8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival.
9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program.
10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy.
11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions.
12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains.
13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution.
14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers.
15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project.
16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer.
17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs.
18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West.
19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight.
20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment.
21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar.
22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.
23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure.
24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis.
25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution.
26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations.
27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups.
28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days.
29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering.
30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic.
31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics.
32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike.
33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO.
34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization.
35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse.
36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction.
37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak.
38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers.
39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT.
40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival.
41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter.
42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker.
43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure.
45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution.
46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC.
47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights.
48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming.
49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics.
50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.
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