The Box

The 40' shipping container ("the box") is the essence of today's global shipping industry and the raison d'être for the Atlantic Sky, her sister ships, and all of her distant cousins.

40' Shipping Container

The story behind this thing is a remarkable story that is told extremely well in Marc Levinson's book, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Larger:

In a nutshell, in 1956 some guy named Malcolm McLean decided that loading and unloading trucks was taking too much time, and therefore costing too much money.  So he just loaded the trucks onto a refitted oil tanker and shipped the trucks with cargo still inside.  And the rest is history.

But it's a fascinating history.  There were technical problems to solve (e.g., how to get the corners to lock together to enable stacked containers), political problems to solve (the longshoremen of the world hated it), regulatory problems to solve, and financing problems to solve.

On the financing side, I found it particularly interesting that the notion of cash flow being more important that assets only developed during this early time period.  I can't remember the exact details, but it surprised me -- as it always does -- when I find that certain financial concepts had to be developed.

Anyway, as I said, these boxes were the raison d'être for the Atlantic Sky and all the other container ships.  I don't think you can really appreciate a cargo ship without knowing the story behind the cargo.  This book is a good read that puts forth a fascinating story.  

And if you don't want to read the book, here's a pretty decent review:

Book Review: The Box

Here is a short video of loading operations from our cabin window while in Norfolk.  Notice that the cargo is actually two 20' containers:

And here is a single 40' container being unloaded (again, from our cabin window):