The Maiden Voyage.

30 Jan The Maiden Voyage.

Until the 1950s, the ocean transport of general cargo generally relied on the very slow, labor intensive and expensive break-bulk method. Frustrated with this process, a young U.S. trucking entrepreneur, Malcolm McLean, decided to carry loaded trailer trucks directly onto ships. The container age began on April 26, 1956, at a remote terminal in Newark, New Jersey, when fifty-eight strengthened truck trailers were loaded aboard the spar deck of a converted oil tanker, the Ideal X, for a voyage to Houston. Marc Levinson writes: “For McLean… the real triumph came only when the costs were tallied. Loading loose cargo onto a medium-sized cargo ship cost $5.83 per ton in 1956. McLean’s experts pegged the cost of loading the Ideal-X at 15.8 cents per-ton. With numbers like that, the container seemed to have a future.”