Shipping the World
Season 1Episode 1
A Twenty-Foot Revolution
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Episode Overview
We discover how a steel box with a standard set of dimensions revolutionised global trade. It began in 1956, when a refitted oil tanker carried nearly 60 containers down the East coast of America from Newark to Houston. This radical new approach was the brainchild of American trucking magnate Malcolm McLean, who had seen the inefficient process of loading goods between ship and truck and knew there had to be a better way. He sold his multimillion dollar trucking business to fund this new endeavour. What followed changed the world. The cargo container.