Box Clever: A Short History of Containers Part 2
BOX CLEVER: A SHORT HISTORY OF CONTAINERS – PART 2
By Bernard Gospel – Technical Committee Secretary TechSec@AMPS.org.uk
in Baltimore. His approach was much more scientific than McLean’s development on the fly. Wheldon was an exponent of the then new science of operational research and had worked on planning the development of the Polaris missile. He considered McLean’s approach puzzling, wondering how McLean could even start without quantitative data. ‘Data first’ was his approach, then to use the data to seek an optimal way forward.
At the end of the last article we left Malcolm McLean in Houston watching the first containership unloading containers onto the shore. HONOLULU He was not the only one looking at container style developments. Matson Navigation, based in San Francisco began a more scientific approach, and an opposite view. Matson was a long established transportation conglomerate, family based, and with a strong element of shipping pineapples and sugar from Hawaii to the mainland USA. Therein lay the problem, directors included Hawaiian growers, whose overriding interest was an economic means of getting product to market. Profit from shipping was incidental. Consultants were employed over a two year time scale, the same period it took McLean to go from concept to operation! Then they created an in-house research department. This was no space race. Matson’s employed Foster Weldon, a professor at John Hopkins University
Wheldon soon evaluated the pertinent issues that would guide his approach. Half Matson’s cargo was suitable for shipment in containers, but the cargo flow was unbalanced. For every ton shipped from Hawaii to the mainland, it shipped three tons the other way. Unfortunately, much of the Hawaii bound shipments were from food distributors in the USA supplying small local stores in Hawaii. To put this in containers would mean consolidating freight in California then unloading at the port in Hawaii. This was inefficient, what was established however was that savings would be made overall, considering the long term trends of rising port labour costs without a corresponding increase in productivity. So, containers seemed to be worthy of further study, but what size should they be? Wheldon’s studies revealed, not unsurprisingly, that smaller containers would have more full loads, but that loading costs were higher if they had lots of smaller containers. He set to work analysing Matson’s shipments. No easy task when manual records had to be entered onto punched cards, then run through a computer. The conclusion? Containers of twenty to twenty five feet in length were the optimal size. Wheldon reported to Matson’s that containers were a promising development, but that initially, containers should be carried as deck cargo on existing freighters. If successful, dedicated containerships could be introduced.
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