The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (22 page)

The sister Marad committee, dealing with container construction and fittings, worked more smoothly. Members readily agreed that each container should be able to carry the weight of five fully loaded containers atop it, with the weight to be carried on the corner posts rather than on container walls. All containers should be designed to be lifted by spreader bars or hooks engaging the top corners. Rings on top for lifting by hooks or slots underneath for forklifts would be acceptable, but not mandatory. Those decisions gave engineers the basic criteria to use in designing new containers. The committee also recommended that each ship be designed with various sizes of steel cells so that it could carry multiple sizes of containers. With that, the two Marad committees scheduled no further meetings.
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Meanwhile, yet another player entered the standards business. The National Defense Transportation Association, representing companies that handled military cargo, decided that it, too, would study container dimensions. The effort’s chief proponent was a brash entrepreneur named Morris Forgash, who had built the United States Freight Company into a $175-million-a-year business over two decades by picking up small lots of cargo from various shippers, consolidating them into truck trailers or containers, and shipping the trailers cross-country by rail. The outspoken Forgash impelled his committee to reach consensus quickly. By late summer of 1959, it had agreed unanimously that “standard” containers would be 20 feet or 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8 feet high. The other lengths approved by the MH-5 and Marad committees, and the 8#-foot-high boxes supported by some truckers and most ship lines, would not be acceptable for military freight—a decision Forgash’s committee was able to reach only because no one from the maritime industry was involved. No matter: individual companies’ preferences, Forgash asserted, would have to yield to the need for uniformity. “Even if we reach the goal slowly, we must have a goal,” he said. “Otherwise, obsolescence will overtake us all if each man is his own engineer.”
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With the MH-5 subcommittee and the Marad dimensions committee having adopted one set of “standard” sizes, and with the National Defense Transportation Association having approved another, the wheeling and dealing began at the American Standards Association. Under the ASA’s normal procedures, the February 1959 subcommittee recommendation to designate six “standard” sizes would have been sent for a mail ballot among all participating organizations. The vote never occurred. Instead, insiders set to work to change the recommendations.

A task force of the dimensions subcommittee convened on September 16, 1959, and its chairman, E. B. Ogden, announced that it was desirable to revisit the question of container length. All but two eastern states now permitted 40-foot trailers, Ogden said, so the length limit that had justified 35-foot boxes no longer existed. In the West, eight states had increased their length limits to permit trucks to pull two trailers of 27 feet each, rather than 24 feet apiece. Ogden, whose Consolidated Freightways was the country’s largest truck line, urged the committee to approve 27-foot containers as a regional standard size for the West, to reduce costs for trucking companies.

Then Herbert Hall, the chair of the entire MH-5 process, intervened. Hall was a retired engineer at Aluminum Company of America, which made aluminum sheets used to manufacture containers. He had sparked the entire standardization process with a presentation to an engineering society in 1957. Hall knew little about the economics of using containers, but he was fascinated by the concept of an arithmetic relationship—preferred numbers, he called it—among sizes. He believed that making containers in 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot lengths would create flexibility. A shipper could put freight for a single customer in the most suitable size rather than wasting space inside a full 40-foot container. A truck equipped to handle a 40-foot container could equally well pick up two 20-foot containers (their precise length was 19 feet 10.5 inches, to make it easy to fit two together in a 40-foot space), or one 20- foot container and two 10-footers. Trains and ships would be able to handle combinations of smaller boxes in the same way. Hall’s enthusiasm was not shared by railroads and ship lines, because loading a train or ship with four 10-foot containers would cost four times as much as loading a single 40-footer. Hall reminded the task force that a higher body, the ASA’s Standards Review Board, would have to approve any proposed standards, and he opined that it would not accept the 12-foot, 17-foot, 24-foot, and 35-foot containers that the MH-5 subcommittee had endorsed. The 10-, 20-, and 40-foot lengths Hall favored were promptly approved, while the other lengths were deleted from the list of “standard” sizes. Those recommendations, along with the proposed 27-foot standard for the West and several standards for container construction, were sent to member organizations for a vote late in 1959.
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The standards Hall wanted stood to have huge implications for the transport sector. No ships or containers then in use or in design would fit into the container system of the future. Pan-Atlantic and Matson would face an unwelcome choice. If they agreed to use only 10-foot, 20-foot, and 40-foot containers, they would be forced to write off tens of millions of dollars of investment, much of it undertaken within the previous two years, and to shift to container sizes that they deemed inefficient for their own purposes. If Pan-Atlantic and Matson declined to adopt the standards, they would forfeit eligibility for government ship-construction subsidies, while their competitors would be able to build “standard” containerships partially at government expense. Either way, the latecomers to containerization would gain at the expense of the pioneers. Individual companies did not vote in the MH-5 committee, but companies’ interests were so disparate that more than a dozen of the industry organizations that did have voting rights failed to reach internal consensus. The proposed 27-foot regional standard was defeated, but the recommendation for Hall’s “modular” lengths met with large numbers of abstentions.
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Matters were so confused that Hall decided to organize a revote. This time, the questions about container construction were left off the ballot, which now had only a single question: should the association establish standard nominal dimensions 8 feet wide, 8 feet high, and 10, 20, 30, and 40 feet long? The 30-foot container had not been debated in the various task forces and subcommittees, but Hall added it in order to have “a definite relationship between the capacities of adjacent sizes” the fact that it appealed to Europeans worried about moving big containers through narrow city streets was an added attraction. Many steamship organizations abstained once again because ofinternal divisions, and again Marad backed the proposal. No vote count was released, but Hall, as chairman, decided that the 10-foot multiples had won sufficient support. On April 14, 1961, 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot boxes were declared to be the only standard containers. The Federal Maritime Board promptly announced that only containerships designed for those sizes could receive construction subsidies.
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The standards wars were by no means over. In fact, they had barely begun. At American urging, the International Standards Organization (ISO), which then had thirty-seven nations as members, agreed to study containers. At the time, only very small containers were being shipped across borders, but bigger ones obviously were on the way. The ISO project was meant to establish worldwide guidelines before firms made large financial commitments. Delegates from eleven countries, and observers from fifteen more, came to New York in September 1961 to start the process. Most were appointed by their governments, with the United States, represented by the American Standards Association, being an exception. The United States, as the convener of the meeting, held the chair.
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ISO’s practice, wherever possible, was to decide how a product must perform rather than how it should be made. This meant that ISO Technical Committee 104 (TC104) would focus on making containers easily interchangeable, not on the details of construction. TC104 was thus able to avoid prolonged debate between proponents of steel containers, popular in Europe, and advocates of the aluminum containers more common in America. No standard would dictate aluminum or steel. TC104 established three working groups and began what would inevitably be a slow-moving process, with many interests involved. The American Standards Association’s MH-5 subcommittees continued work on other domestic standards, with the hope that whatever they agreed would later be accepted by ISO. Many leading U.S. transport engineers were involved simultaneously in both groups.
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The wrangling over container sizes, which had consumed three years in the United States, was now repeated at the international level. By 1962, much of Europe was allowing larger vehicles than was America, so the new American standard sizes, 8 feet high, 8 feet wide, and 10, 20, 30, or 40 feet long, faced no technical obstacles. Economic interests were another story. Many continental European railroads owned fleets of much smaller containers, made for 8 or 10 cubic meters of freight rather than the 72.5 cubic meter volume of a 40-foot container. The Europeans wanted their containers recognized as standard. The British, Japanese, and North American delegations were all opposed, because the European containers were slightly wider than 8 feet. A compromise was struck in April 1963. Smaller containers, including the European railroad sizes and American 5-foot and
-foot boxes, would be recognized as “Series 2” containers. In 1964, these smaller sizes, along with 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot containers, were formally adopted as ISO standards. Not a single container owned by the two leading containership operators, Sea-Land Service (the former Pan-Atlantic) and Matson, conformed to the new “standard” dimensions.
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While one set of ISO subcommittees and task forces was hashing out dimensions, other groups of experts were seeking common ground concerning strength requirements and lifting standards. In both North America and Europe, small containers were often moved with forklifts, and some had eyes on the top through which longshoremen or railroad workers could insert hooks connected to winches. The larger containers introduced in North America had steel fittings at each corner, which were welded to the corner post, to a top or bottom rail running the length of the container, and to cross-members running across the front or back end. The corner fittings were cast with holes, through which the containers could be lifted, locked to a chassis, or connected to one another. These castings were simple to make, costing about five dollars apiece in 1961.
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The problem came with the lifting and locking devices that fit into the holes. Pan-Atlantic, the first out of the gate, had applied for a patent on its particular system, which used conical lugs that could slip through the oblong holes of its corner fittings and automatically lock into place; a double-headed device to hold two containers together could be secured with the twist of a handle. Pan-Atlantic threatened to bring suit against anyone infringing on its design, forcing other ship lines and trailer manufacturers to develop their own locks and corner fittings. This meant that, even if container sizes were standardized, Sea-Land’s cranes would not be able to lift Grace’s containers, and Sea-Land containers could never ride on Matson chassis. Railroads that carried the containers of various ship lines needed complicated systems of chains and locks to secure all of the different containers, because one simple locking system would not work for all. Agreeing on a standard corner fitting thus was crucial to making containers readily interchangeable. The obstacle was that every company had financial reasons to favor its own fitting. Adopting some other design would require it to install new fittings on every container, to buy new lifting and locking devices, and to pay a license fee to the patent holder.

An MH-5 task force had tried, and failed, to come up with a new design compatible with all existing corner fittings in 1961. Inevitably, the question arose: could any of the patented corner fittings serve as the U.S. standard? It could, Hall advised at an MH-5 meeting in December 1961, so long as it was in widespread use and was available to all for a nominal royalty. The task force chairman, Keith Tantlinger, had designed the Sea-Land fitting while working for Malcom McLean in 1955. He was now chief engineer at Fruehauf Trailer Company, and he offered royalty-free use of Fruehauf’s newest design, in which a steel lug slipped through the hole in a corner fitting and locked into place with a pin. Strick Trailers, a Fruehauf competitor, objected that the Fruehauf design was not good for coupling containers together, and, besides, it had not been proven in actual use. Strick’s own design, however, was mired in a patent dispute and could not be offered as a standard. National Castings Company threatened a lawsuit unless any new standard was compatible with its own system, which used lugs designed to spread apart when they passed through the hole in the corner fitting.