About the author. The following article was written by a colleague and friend Capt. Robert Rayner of the UK but whom resides in Subic Bay - Phillipines due to his business. We are thrilled he allowed us to publish this on-line.



The Container and Worldtrade by Capt. Robert Rayner

The British shipping magazine Fairplay was first published in 1883 and celebrated its 120th Anniversary by asking its readers to vote for who they considered to be the most significant person in shipping over the last 120 years. Far out in front was one man - the Scottish American Malcolm Maclean. Perhaps he is not a household name, but he should be. Malcolm Maclean is the inventor of the container. His invention has revolutionised world trade, its impact felt nowhere more spectacularly than by that servant of the world markets - the shipping industry. Perhaps only "Le grande Francais" Ferdinand de Lesseps comes close to Maclean's achievement. It was de Lesseps who opened the Suez Canal in 1869 and who did the pioneering work for the Panama Canal, both now strategic routes for the passage of merchant ships and their cargoes.

The first container ship was a converted oil tanker the Ideal X, whose deck had been strengthened to accommodate 58 containers. It set sail on 26 April 1956, from Port Newark in New Jersey down the east coast of the US into the Gulf of Mexico and on to Houston. In 1960, Mclean renamed his company Sea-Land Service Ltd. and when he sold his share in Sea-Land for US$160million in 1968, it was the world's biggest container carrier.

It was not long before ports started to see the great potential of containerised trade and the need to provide specialised handling facilities for the new ship types. In 1960 the Port of New York Authority, constructed the first exclusive container terminal next to Port Newark and named it Port Elizabeth Marine Terminal. Other great ports followed - Rotterdam in 1966 and Singapore in 1972, these ports being among the biggest in the world today.

So what is a container ? The International Standards Organisation calls a freight container 'an article of transport equipment intended to facilitate the carriage of goods by one or more modes of transport, without intermediate loading'. Containers come in two sizes: 20 feet long and 40-feet long. They are 8 feet wide and range from 8 feet to 9 feet 6 inches in height. Most containers are constructed from steel - about 2.5 tons of steel is used in a 40-foot container. Each corner of a container is designed to withstand a load of 96 tons, the equivalent of five fully laden containers. The floors can withstand loads of about 24.5 kg/cm2 (350 p.s.i.). Nearly 87% of containers are made in China and other Asian countries.
And a TEU ? This is an acronym for "Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit" and has become the industry standard of measurement for containerized trade. In 1969, Mr. Richard F Gibney, who worked for the Shipbuilding and Shipping Record's office of the U.K. came up with the term while looking for a convenient way of compiling statistics of different ships and the different sized containers in use at the time. One TEU represents a capacity of about 34 cubic meters.

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Also, please feel free to read more about the history of our main products, the Queen Mary Ship, the SS United States, and the Normandie ship. Their model specifications can be found in our Ocean Liner products section.