Want to send something up the coast? Take a truck of cargo to the port, unload it all on to the quay, reload it bit-by-bit onto the ship, repeat in reverse at the other end. Chaotic, clunky and insecure – the picture below is from the Korean War, but could just as easily be from the 1800’s.
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Mclean’s insight was that the only thing that matters is getting cargo from one place to another as quickly as possible. It appeared everyone involved in the supply chain was doing different things. Ships were being built for sailing efficiency, trucks for driving quality, and ports for storage capacity.
What about a container that didn’t have to be unloaded? It could be plonked onto a truck in North Carolina, and then a boat in New York, and then a different truck in Rotterdam. This was not an entirely new suggestion, but no-one had taken it seriously.
Mclean did. He thought about the whole thing, end-to-end. And in 1956, he made his move.
- He designed and built a container that stacked and locked (with his engineer partner Keith Tantlinger).
- He bought two ships and refitted them to store his new containers efficiently.
- He persuaded ports to redesign their layouts, and to invest in cranes (notably in New York and California).
He then did one more thing: He made his container design available for free, giving up the rights to royalties to encourage it’s adoption as the global standard.
By 1974 uploading looked completely different:

Today, 90% of international cargo travels in the standardized containers created by Mclean, the cost of shipping a tonne of freight has fallen by about 90% since 1930. The largest port in the world, Shanghai, unloads nearly 50 million containers every year!
Sometimes, the best ideas come from thinking ABOUT the box … rather than outside it! Food for thought…….

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