My order came up short again

Paid for a hundred cases of whiskey. Ninety-six arrived, and the dock crew was in a very good mood. — Liquor store owner, 1952

In 1937 a truck driver named Malcom McLean spent most of a day at a New Jersey pier, waiting while the dock crew carried his cotton bales onto a ship one at a time. Everything went aboard that way: every sack, barrel and crate. It ran almost $6 a ton, and some of the cargo walked off. McLean's idea was to skip all that. Take the box off the truck's wheels, lock it, and set the whole thing on the ship. In 1956 he sent 58 of those truck boxes from Newark to Houston on a converted tanker. Loading cost about 16 cents a ton, and nobody walked off with anything. Took him 19 years, but he got out of that line.

What it broke: the docks, and then most of the places things used to be made.

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McLean bet the business on it. In 1955 he sold his own trucking company, which made good money, to buy a shipping line that barely did.

The first trip wasn't fancy. The Ideal-X was still working as a tanker, with 15,000 tons of petroleum below deck and the 58 boxes riding on top. A crane set one down about every seven minutes, and the whole load went on in under eight hours.

The first ship to carry nothing but boxes, the Gateway City, an old wartime freighter gutted and refitted, sailed on October 4, 1957, with 226 containers aboard. That was the same day the Soviets launched Sputnik. Then in 1967 his company won the Defense Department contract to supply the troops in Vietnam by container ship, and the war helped carry the boxes to Asia. Sold his trucks to bet on a boat. Most men wouldn't have.