Steel boxes that have revolutionized logistics

Everyone has seen them and wondered what is inside them, or even if there is anything inside at all. Shipping Containers, or just plain containers.

Shipping containers were invented in 1956 and changed dockyards from labor-intensive to capital-intensive institutions virtually overnight.

Shipping containers are large steel boxes that were originally designed to reduce the time a ship spent in port. Money was saved in port charges, as well as enabling a ship to make more round trips each year. A container ship can dock, unload and reload, if necessary, all in a fraction of the time it would have taken to unload a ship in the pre-container era.

Shipping containers are 40 feet long and have a multitude of uses. We see them stacked up in freight yards and on ships. we see them on trains and trucks and we see them outside factories being loaded or just used as temporary storage.

Container ships and therefore shipping containers were developed to speed loading time at the dockside and to reduce theft by dock workers. Before containers were introduced, thousands of individual packing cases had to be loaded by hand, time consuming and therefore expensive….