Malcolm McLean

Malcolm McLean invented containerised shipping and reshaped world trade. Born in Maxton, North Carolina in 1913 to a farming family, he had no money for college, worked at a filling station, and bought a second-hand truck in 1934. He built McLean Trucking into one of the largest haulage firms in the United States. The idea came from waiting. In 1937, delivering cotton bales to a pier in Hoboken, he sat for hours watching longshoremen unload his truck piece by piece and load it onto a ship by the same method. Break-bulk handling was slow, expensive, prone to theft and damage, and accounted for a very large share of the cost of moving anything. His insight was that the cargo should never be handled at all between origin and destination — only the box containing it should move, transferring directly between truck, ship and train. Trucking and shipping companies were forbidden by regulation to own each other, so in 1955 he sold his trucking firm and bought a shipping line, Pan-Atlantic, instead. On 26 April 1956 the converted tanker Ideal X sailed from Newark to Houston carrying fifty-eight containers on deck. The cost of loading fell from about $5.86 a ton to sixteen cents. He then did the thing that made it universal: in 1968 he released the patents on the corner fitting and twist-lock mechanism royalty-free so that a single international standard could be adopted. Docks emptied of labour and moved to deep-water sites, and freight costs collapsed, which made globalised manufacturing possible. He died in 2001.

• Lived: 1913 CE – 2001 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: entrepreneur, businessman