In the mid-1950s, McLean, who began as a truck driver in North Carolina and built a huge trucking company, came up with the notion of taking the body from a tractor-trailer and placing it fully-loaded on a ship, a railroad car, or even an airplane.  Ocean shipping in this manner saves the tedious, expensive, and time-consuming  job of unloading cargo from a truck or a railroad car, loading it into the hull of a ship and reversing the process at the ship's destination.  A standard container can carry up to 20 tons (U.S.) fully loaded.  It can keep shipments together, protect them from the elements, from damage in handling, and from theft.  An estimated 90 percent of the world's trade today moves in containers.  One hundred million container loads crisscross the world's oceans each year in over 5,000 container ships.  According to one of the web sites listed below, there are enough containers in the world today to build an 8 foot high wall twice around the Equator.

Not everyone welcomed the container revolution.  Port operators resisted investing in the expensive new equipment needed to hoist containers on and off ships while longshoremen who handled the cargo fought to keep their jobs which were threatened by the new technology.  But the advantages of containerization were too powerful to resist.  And the effects go far beyond the ports.  In fact, many observers attribute the rise of trade between the U.S. and Asia to the reductions in cost and shipping time that containerization made possible.  As an example, standard shipments from Hong Kong to New York, which took approximately 50 days in 1970, today take only 17 days.  Malcolm McLean, while hardly a household name, is recognized as one of the most important innovators of the past 50 years. 

Marc Levinson, The Box:  How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton University Press, 2006).  A fascinating book on the rise of containerized shipping by the former finance and economics editor of The Economist.

Maersk-Sealand is one of the largest container shipping firms in the world. Their container page provides information on their various types of ships.

APL Container Shipping - subsidiary of Singapore-based Neptune Orient Lines.

containershipping.com. "A regularly researched free service, dedicated to container shipping, providing links to sources of news, market reports, statistics, analysis, directories, guides and more."  If you are in the container shipping business or are looking for a container shipper, this is the place.

CP Ships  container shipping site - with a nice chart showing how the shipping process works from the viewpoint of the customer.

Obituary for Malcolm McLean, "father of containerization," from The Washington Post, May 27, 2001.

Malcolm McLean obit in Real Audio on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, May 29, 2001. "Noah Adams talks with Paul Richardson, former president of SeaLand Inc., about Malcolm McLean, who revolutionized the shipping industry with his idea for using containers to store goods on ships."

Promoting creativity, using Malcolm McLean's invention of containerized shipping as an example.  From the web site of Philip Adam & Associates, a Milwaukee based management consulting firm.

"The 20-Ton Packet," by Stewart Taggart, in Wired, October 1999.Interesting article describing container shipping as analogous to a real-time data-streaming network.

Photos of Container Shipping on Photovault.com. A large collection of very nice photos (thumbnailed on the linked page). You must pay a licensing fee to use them (but you can view them gratis).

A container shipping slide show, with narration and background sound in RealAudio. 

Atlantic Container Line - "the leading carrier of containers. . . between North America and Europe."

"Seacurity" - Improving the Security of the Global Sea-Container Shipping System -- a report from the Rand Corporation (2003). Protecting containers against their use by terrorists is a growing problem; this report, based on a workshop organized by the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, suggests approaches for dealing with it. (pdf)

Container ships - economic need and environmental implications.  Part of a student project in political science on invasive species in Narragansett Bay at Providence (RI) College. 

Quik House - a home built out of five modified containers.  The basic model is available for $76,000 plus shipping from Adam Kalkin in Bernardsville, NJ.  Check it out - a very cool idea.