Did you know a trucking entrepreneur invented the modern shipping container?

A dockworker from the 1950s would not recognize a modern cargo port, where huge gantries move steel boxes full of cargo from all over the world between ships, trains, and trucks.

As part of a series on 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, BBC World Service traces the history of the shipping container, noting that its invention, rather than free trade agreements, has been "perhaps the biggest enabler of globalisation."

The idea of loading cargo into some sort of standardized box, then loading the box onto ships, wasn't exactly new. According to the World Shipping Council, boxes similar to modern containers had been used for combined rail- and horse-drawn transport in England as early as 1792. The U.S. government used small standard-sized containers during the Second World War, which proved a means of quickly and efficiently unloading and distributing supplies.

But as the BBC report notes, there were a host of roadblocks to widely implementing shipping containers as we know them today.

One of those was opposition from powerful dockworkers' unions -- because containers would mean fewer jobs (although it also would make loading ships safer; In a large port, someone would be killed every few weeks.)

When I recently interviewed Andrew McAfee, an MIT scientist who studies how technological progress changes business, the economy, and society, about the future of autonomous trucks, he pointed to the automation at ports as an example of how the march of technology continues to mean the loss of jobs in some areas and the gain of jobs in others.

Other obstacles? Trucking companies, shipping companies, and ports couldn't agree on a standard size. And separate sets of U.S. regulations kept tight control on how much  shipping and trucking companies could charge.

"The man who navigated this maze of hazards, and who can fairly be described as the inventor of the modern shipping container system, was called Malcom McLean," notes the BBC article. A trucking entrepreneur, "He knew plenty about trucks, plenty about playing the system, and all there was to know about saving money.... As Marc Levinson explains in his book, The Box, McLean not only saw the potential of a shipping container that would fit neatly onto a flat bed truck, he also had the skills and the risk-taking attitude needed to make it happen."

In the 1950s, McLean exploited a regulatory loophole to gain control of both a trucking company and a shipping company, and when dockers went on strike, he retrofit old ships to new container specifications.

As the World Shipping Council reports, "On 26 April 1956, Malcom McLean's converted World War II tanker, the Ideal X, made its maiden voyage from Port Newark to Houston in the USA. It had a reinforced deck carrying 58 metal container boxes as well as 15,000 tons of bulk petroleum. 

"By the time the container ship docked at the Port of Houston six days later, the company was already taking orders to ship goods back to Port Newark in containers. McLean's enterprise later became known as Sea-Land Services, a company whose ships carried cargo-laden truck trailers between Northern and Southern ports in the USA."

But the real breakthrough came in the last 1960s, says the BBC, when McLean convinced the U.S. military that container shipping was a far faster way to get equipment to Vietnam. The "backhaul?" Goods from Japan. Trans-Pacific trade began in earnest.

One transformation McLean couldn't navigate, however, was deregulation in the early 1980s. As reported in HDT's 1998 book "100 Years of Trucking," McLean's eponymous North Carolina-based trucking company was one of the first to fold in the new highly competitive era. However, Sea-Land Services was eventually split into three entities, according to Wikipedia, and the international container shipping business today is part of the Maersk Group.