Who would have thought such an ordinary creation would change the world?

The cargo container has done just that, transforming the global economy in ways comparable to the telephone and the jet plane by making the world a little smaller.

By dramatically increasing the efficiency of, and reducing the cost of, cargo transportation, the container has expanded markets for both U.S. and international goods. Now, it's commonplace to find Japanese televisions, Chinese clothing, Swedish furniture and German beer on American store shelves.

The box altered the future of nations when manufacturing operations, chasing lower labor costs, sprouted throughout Asia, particularly in China.

In Hampton Roads, the container afforded the Port of Virginia the opportunity to transform itself from a sleepy mid-Atlantic seaport into one of the country's largest.

These changes were all set in motion 50 years ago this Wednesday, when a converted tanker ship set sail from Newark, N.J., to Houston laden with 58 converted truck bodies filled with cargo. Never before had such a voyage taken place.

Today containers dominate global trade, with ships specially built to carry thousands of them criss crossing the oceans.

Last year, the United States imported 7.7 million containers carrying contents valued at $784.4 billion, according to PIERS Global Intelligence Solutions, which tracks cargo shipments. Of those, more than 390,000 boxes - with cargo worth an estimated $36.9 billion - came through the Port of Virginia, making it the third-largest East Coast port, well behind New York but close to Charleston, S.C.

Several thousand containers lay waiting one Thursday morning this month at Portsmouth Marine Terminal .

In stacks up to five tall, their shades of blue, red and green provided a colorful backdrop to the waterfront. Stamped on them were the diverse names of their ocean liner owners, companies such as China Shipping, Uniglory, Evergreen, Hamburg Sud and United Arab Shipping.

On the wharf, dockworkers loaded and unloaded containers from the German-flagged Ibn Sina. Three cranes the height of 10-story buildings towered over the vessel. In just a few minutes, each crane cycled through the process of hoisting a container from the ship, lowering it to the wharf, and then lifting another box aboard, where hundreds of colorful boxes were stacked neatly like Lego blocks.

Eight-wheeled "straddle carriers" picked up and dropped off containers on the wharf underneath the cranes. Looking like imperial walkers in the "Star Wars" movies, the contraptions are 34-foot-tall rectangular frames that snatch containers off the ground and wheel them around the terminal, chirping like loud crickets to warn of their movements.

It took 15 hours for 886 containers to be transferred to and from the ship. Arriving containers were stored in rows beside the wharf. Later, they would be placed onto truck trailers and hauled away - some to railroad terminals, some to local warehouses and distribution centers and some directly to their final destinations.

It's a tremendous departure from how cargo used to move between ship and shore.

Before the advent of containers, dockworkers' muscle moved much of the cargo.

Freight needed to be transferred between ships and dockside warehouses. The advent of the internal combustion engine eased some of the burden for dockworkers, also known as longshoremen, as cranes and forklifts took over some of the heavy lifting.

For the bags, boxes and barrels that weren't piled on pallets, though, it was up to the longshoremen to drag, pull or carry them into place. That would be done in the warehouses, on the docks and in vessel holds, where cargo needed to be unpacked or stowed piece by piece.

The work needed to be done no matter the weather. A t a workplace with abundant hazards in the form of heavy loads, hooks and ropes, injuries were commonplace.

Men could spend their days carrying 120-pound bags of fertilizer or cement, recalled Edward L. Brown Sr., a vice president with the International Longshoremen's Association.

"You got tired, but after a while your body got toughened to it," said Brown, the top ILA official in Hampton Roads, who got his start on the Norfolk docks in the 1950s. Still, "The first day was always a little rough."

At least once, he said, he had to carry maggot-infested cow hides.

"The clothes you wore that day you couldn't wear no more," he said.

Ships could spend up to a week at a dock, waiting for the longshoremen who crowded the docks to finish moving the goods.

The costs added up: Dockside labor typically amounted to at least half of the shipping cost, wrote Marc Levinson in his book "The Box," a history of the shipping container.

The situation was ripe for a breakthrough.

Malcom McLean, the owner of a North Carolina trucking company, launched the world on the path toward containerization and ultimately globalized the global economy.

He didn't invent cargo boxes, but he did refit the first ship to carry containers. A variety of interchangeable metal cargo boxes had been tinkered with by various companies - mainly railroads - since at least the late 19th century, according to Levinson, a former editor at The Economist magazine.

McLean overcame the financial and regulatory hurdles that caused others to stumble in their attempts to establish a useful container service. He was determined to make containers succeed, believing that growing highway congestion, plus road taxes and tolls, threatened the future of his successful trucking business, according to "The Box That Changed the World," written by Arthur Donovan and Joseph Bonney.

McLean bought a shipping line and grew it into what became known as Sea-Land Service, which now exists as parts of the Danish shipping giant Maersk Line and the smaller U.S. carrier Horizon Lines.

"We didn't have much time to stop and think about if we were revolutionizing the world," said Paul F. Richardson, a former president of Sea-Land who joined McLean in 1952. "All these pundits kept saying we were going to go broke. We had to prove them wrong."

With containers, cargo could be packed once at the factory and unloaded once at the final destination. Along the way, that box might be carried by trucks, trains or ships. With the more efficient containers, labor costs plummeted because fewer workers were needed on the docks, on ships, in warehouses and on the railroads. Theft and damage also declined because the cargo was securely locked in the box.

The cost of shipping goods worldwide now accounts for 1 percent or less of retail prices, according to "The Box That Changed the World." For example, it costs roughly 34 cents to ship a pair of shoes that sells for $45 in an American store from an Asian factory. And it costs about $12.50 to import a television that costs $2,500.

Containers alone didn't create globalization. Improvements in communications, trade agreements that reduced tariffs and the end of fixed monetary exchange rates all contributed as well, said Bonney, also the editor of The Journal of Commerce maritime magazine, in an interview. But it's the containers that deliver the goods worldwide.

Today, about 15 million containers roam the globe, according to the Institute of International Container Lessors, a trade group.

They are so widely used and flow into the United States from so many points that many worry that they could be used for a terrorist attack. The fear is that terrorists could smuggle a bomb or a biological weapon into the country inside one. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government and local agencies such as the Virginia Port Authority have stepped up security screenings in response. Also, illegal immigrants sometimes try to enter the country tucked away in a container.

Still, forecasts show the amount of freight moving through the nation by container doubling by 2020.

"It's so firmly established now that it'll remain the primary means of moving cargo internationally," Bonney said.

In Hampton Roads, containers were seen as a way to turn around the port's fortunes, said J. Robert "Bobby" Bray, executive director of the Port Authority, which owns terminals in Norfolk, Portsmouth and Newport News.

In the mid-1960s, as containers grew in popularity, the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth were each building new cargo terminals - now known as Norfolk International Terminals and Portsmouth Marine Terminal. Those facilities began a new era for the port, which until then had only terminals owned by the predecessors of today's Norfolk Southern and CSX railroads.

The railroads viewed their terminals as secondary businesses, so they were not maintaining or running them well, Bray said.

James N. Crumbley, a retired port executive, pushed to install container cranes at the new Norfolk terminal, which he oversaw at that time.

"They had just started a thing called containerization," Crumbley recalled. "It looked successful, so I decided to do that at NIT. I remember when we got 100 a month, I thought we were really doing great."

This February alone, 80,000 containers moved through Hampton Roads' terminals.

Containerization made it possible for the port to succeed despite Hampton Roads' not being a major population center.

As global trade grew and the ships along with it, shipping lines wanted those larger vessels to be loaded and unloaded as quickly as possible, said Thomas D. Capozzi, the Port Authority's senior managing director of marketing services. Despite being somewhat isolated from the bulk of the population on the East Coast and in the Midwest, Hampton Roads' port became more attractive because of its proximity to the ocean.

By contrast, the port of Baltimore is a 12-hour sail up the Chesapeake Bay from Hampton Roads. Rail service provided by Norfolk-based Norfolk Southern allowed containerized cargo to be quickly moved between Hampton Roads and the rest of the country, Bray said.

"Containerization enabled us to work the vessel and move that cargo out very quickly to population centers by rail or truck," Capozzi said.

Shipping lines began migrating to Hampton Roads from Baltimore in the 1980s and 1990s, and now the port even is gaining Midwest cargo from New York.

The growth of container traffic through Hampton Roads is fueling continued waterfront development. APM Terminals will open a 291-acre, $450 million terminal in Portsmouth next year to serve Maersk Line, and the Port Authority is seeking approval to build a massive new container terminal that would open in 2017 on Craney Island, also in Portsmouth.

J.J. "Jeff" Keever, the Port Authority's deputy executive director, said: "It's thanks to containerization that the Port of Virginia is where it is today."

Reach Gregory Richards at (757) 446-2599 or gregory.richards@pilotonline.com.
© 2006 HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com

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