Source: Maersk/SeaLand.
The dawn of container shipping can be traced to the Port of New York & New Jersey. On April 26th, 1956, the Ideal-X left the Port of Newark, New Jersey, for the Port of Houston, Texas, which was called five days later. It carried 58 35-feet (8 feet wide by 8 feet high) containers, along with a regular load of 15,000 tons of bulk petroleum. The containers were loaded in less than eight hours, substantially faster than conventional handling of break-bulk cargo. The 35-foot unit was the standard truck size in the United States at that time, particularly because there were very few highways and the turning radius on standard roads did not allow for long trailers.
This first containership was converted from a T2 oil tanker under the initiative of Malcolm McLean (1914-2001), a trucking magnate who saw the tremendous potential of containerization, particularly in terms of loading and unloading costs. In 1937, while delivering cotton bales from North Carolina (Lafayette) to New York Harbor, McLean was forced to wait several days while longshoremen manually loaded the cargo. The time- and cost-intensive nature of standard break-bulk cargo operations was an important impediment to trade and shipping. McLean calculated that in 1956, loading a medium-sized ship the conventional way cost $5.83 a ton. By comparison, loading containers (using the Ideal-X as a frame of reference) would cost less than $0.16 per ton. The economic advantages of such a mode of transportation became clear to the shipping industry.
The initial goal of McLean was to create an integrated transport system in the United States where coastal shipping would complement road and rail transportation. This goal was difficult to achieve because of the segmented nature of the industry. Further, the development of the Interstate Highway System in the United States during the 1960s improved trucking efficiency considerably, particularly over long distances over which rail and coastal shipping were conventionally more competitive. To better support intermodalism between road and rail, McLean initially proposed that an entire truck trailer be handled as a unit (as a trailer on a flatcar is handled by rail). This proved impractical because it was taking away too much cargo volume on the ship. Containers and chassis became separate intermodal units.
In 1960, McLean founded SeaLand, a major container shipping line, which was purchased in 1999 by Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company at the time. The Ideal X carried containers until 1964, when it was scrapped.