Get to Know about the History of Storage Containers

On April 26, 1956, in Newark, New Jersey onto the deck of an aging tanker ship moored a crane lifted 58 aluminum truck bodies. Here for delivery to local warehouses and factories waiting trucks collected the containers five days later, the Ideal-X sailed into Houston, Texas.

The customize storage containers would become such a familiar part of the landscape from that modest beginning, that when they saw one at the loading dock of the neighbourhood grocery and they passed one on the highway, Americans would not think twice.

From the mind of a North Carolina truck driver named Malcom McLean It all sprang. He was a man who proceeded to turn it upside down although he had no experience in the maritime industry.

McLean was a man who was always thinking about business and was a compulsive entrepreneur born in the tiny cotton center of Maxton in 1913. From the side of the road as a child, he sold eggs. Graduating high school in 1931, he managed a gas station and then stocked shelves in a grocery store in the midst of the Great Depression.

While still selling gasoline serving as the sole driver he opened McLean Trucking by buying a used truck in 1934. Into one of the nation’s largest trucking companies he quickly built McLean Trucking armed with boundless ambition.  Up and down the East Coast McLean Trucking hauled other goods, cigarettes, and textiles.

Based on the cost of providing service the Interstate Commerce Commission, a powerful federal agency, closely regulated, requiring that rates be. For innovative ideas that lowered his company’s costs Malcom McLean was known, such as improve fuel efficiency or to reduce wind resistance crenellating the sides of trailers.

This helped to take market share from its competitors and reduce rates of the moving companies.

U.S. highways were becoming heavily congested and auto sales were booming by the early 1950s.  In the future the Interstate Highway system was still years.

McLean, concerned that traffic jams were raising his company’s costs and delaying his drivers, conceived of waterfront terminals at which trucks would deposit their trailers aboard ships and drive up ramps.