1984

Container Shipping

Think about shipping back in the WWII era. Any consumer item being shipped over the ocean had to be loaded into a ship’s cargo hold on pallets using cranes. A group of people known as longshoremen—often 20 or more for a large ship—would oversee and facilitate this process. To load a ship they would move the cargo on board, pack it tightly in the hold, and secure it. Unloading reversed the process.

Containerized shipping, introduced in 1984, reconceptualized the entire international shipping process. In containerized shipping, large, reusable, standardized steel containers are loaded and sealed by the shipper. Sealed containers make their way to the dock by truck or train. At the dock, large crane systems quickly load the containers onto specially designed container ships. Because the containers move freely between ships, trains, and trucks, they are called intermodal containers.

Modern container ships are massive—some of the largest ships in the world—holding thousands of containers per trip. A typical ship might have a two-stroke diesel engine capable of 100,000+ hp (80 megawatts). At full power, the ship burns 3,600 gallons/hour (13,600 liters/hour), but at an economical cruise speed it is running at approximately half power. This means that high-efficiency ships might emit 3 grams of CO2 per ton of cargo per kilometer, making it a green way to move cargo.

The containers themselves are engineering works of art. A typical container is 102 inches (259 cm) high, 96 inches (244 cm) wide, and 40 feet (12 meters) long. It is made of corrugated steel with reinforced corners and corner posts. The corners have holes in them to allow cranes to quickly attach, and connectors to interlock the containers on the ship. A typical container this size weighs about 9,000 pounds (4,000 kg) empty and can take on almost 58,000 pounds (26,000 kg) of cargo.

The introduction of intermodal containerized shipping revolutionized the shipping industry by lowering costs and dramatically increasing the speed of loading and unloading.

SEE ALSO Two-Stroke Diesel Engine (1893).

The cargo ship Inception full of containers in port on July 30, 2012 in Istanbul.