The real story
Malcom McLean ran one of America's largest trucking firms, and the story goes that he got the idea years earlier while waiting all day at a dock for his cargo to be unloaded crate by crate. On 26 April 1956 his converted wartime tanker, the Ideal X, sailed from Newark, New Jersey to Houston carrying 58 truck-sized containers on deck.
Loading loose cargo then cost about $5.83 a ton; McLean's team worked out the Ideal X cost about 16 cents. Theft and breakage dropped because the boxes stayed sealed from factory to shop. Once sizes were standardised in the 1960s, ports rebuilt themselves around giant cranes, and today's biggest ships carry more than 24,000 twenty-foot containers.
