* “Twenty-foot Equivalent Units.” A TEU represents one 20 x 8 x 8.5 foot shipping container; a 40-foot container is two TEUs.
A quick modern maritime trade history, in three ships:
1. The Warrior: In 1954, the National Academy of Sciences studied the voyage of a “general cargo” freighter from New York to Hamburg. The Warrior, measuring 142 meters long, 19 wide, and 32 deep, had a crew of 44. On this voyage it carried 194,582 individual pieces of cargo, which weighed 5,015 tons and arrived at the port in a kaleidoscopic 15 types of “packaging.” The study’s author counted 24,036 bags, 10,671 boxes, 717 cartons, 74,908 cases, 5 “reels”, 815 barrels, 888 cans, 15,38 drums, 2,877 packages, 2,634 pieces, 21 crates, 10 transporters, 2,880 bundles, 53 wheeled vehicles, and 1,525 “undetermined” types of packages. A 22-person “longshore gang” took 35 days to pack this cargo in wooden pallets in New York and load it onto the ship. The German crew at the other end of the trip needed 4 days to unload it after arrival.
2. The Ideal-X: The first container ship, a retrofitted World War II freighter renamed Ideal-X, launched in April 1956 from Newark on a trip to Houston. It was about the same size as the Warrior — 160 meters long, 9 wide, and 21 deep — and carried 58 proto-containers holding 10,572 tons of cargo. Malcolm McLean, the North Carolina trucking executive who designed it, is said to have calculated that traditional “breakbulk” loading of Warrior-type ships cost $5.83 per ton of cargo. (“Breakbulk”: Loading individual cargo items into ship holds after packing them in wooden pallets; see below for a real-life case study in this.) Simply disconnecting a truck’s trailer from the chassis and putting it on deck, by contrast, cut this cost by 97%, to 16 cents per ton. Ideal-X took eight hours to load.
By 1990, a worldwide fleet of 1169 container-ships was carrying around over 1.2 million TEU, or an average of over 1,000 twenty-foot containers per ship. A decade-old but still striking paper (Daniel Bernhofen, Zouheir el-Sahli, Richard Kindner) investigated the effects of the shift from break-bulk to containerized cargo, concluding that it had been about twice as powerful a driver of trade growth as tariff cuts and trade agreements. Specifically:
a. Participation in the two multilateral GATT agreements of the era — the “Kennedy Round” of 1968 and the “Tokyo Round” of 1979, which applied to 94 countries as of 1990 — raised trade volume 285%, or three-fold.
b. Participation in free trade agreements (meaning in practice the creation of the European Economic Community in the late 1950s, its expansion from the original six members to 12 between 1973 and 1985, plus the U.S.-Canada auto pact of 1965, the U.S.-Israel FTA of 1985, and the U.S.-Canada FTA of 1988) raised trade about 45% or half-fold. (If “half-fold” is a word).
c. Adoption of container shipping raised trade 790%, or nine-fold.
3. The Ever Alot: Since Mclean’s ingenious low-tech innovation, container shipping has followed a sort of Moore’s Law-like expansion curve, with capacity at least doubling every decade. By 2000, fleet capacity had reached 2400 ships carrying 4.3 million TEU, and by 2010, 4700 ships and 12.8 million TEU. The 6,406 container ships active as of mid-2022 carry 25.8 million TEU, meaning an average of over 4,000 containers per ship. A median-size container vessel is said to take about 15 hours to load and unload.
The largest container ship yet built — unpoetically but accurately named Ever Alot – is owned by Taiwan’s Evergreen lines, and went into service on June 22. It is 400 meters long, 61.5 meters wide, and 100 meters deep; requires a crew of 25; and can carry 24,004 TEU. At maximum weight, this would be about half a million tons of cargo, equivalent to 100 Warriors or 50 Ideal-X’s. Ever Alot arrives at Malaysia’s Tanjung Pelepas port tomorrow.
UNCTAD’s 2021 Review of Maritime Transport has data and trends for container ships, oil tankers, port efficiency, and more about the 99,8000 large commercial vessels on the water this year.
A decade-old but still compelling visualization of the maritime world.
A dissenting view: Container modernization is accelerating too fast; very big ships are forcing unhealthy shipping-line consolidation and creating a capacity glut.
Then and now
The Ever Alot,launched three weeks ago, carries 24,004 containers.
The Ideal-X and its first voyage.
Though the National Academy study of the Warrior appears unavailable online, Marc Levinson’s The Box (2005), written for the 50th anniversary of the Ideal-X’s journey, has a summary of the survey, as well as a large-scale review of the invention, spread, and implications of container shipping, 1956 to 2005:
A bit more perspective — Ideal-X was innovative, but not very large. The largest 19th century clipper ship, the 1853 Great Republic, was just a bit smaller, and could carry nearly as much cargo as the Warrior: 102 meters long, 16 wide, 25 deep and able to carry about 3,500 tons of cargo. From the Smithsonian’s American History Museum.
And two more book recommendations:
Horatio Clare’s Down to the Sea in Ships (2015) recounts a trip on the Gerd Maersk, a 6,600-TEU ship built in 2006, from the U.K.’s Felixstowe port through the Suez Canal, to Malaysia, Vietnam, and China, and ending at Los Angeles. Detail on crew life (Filipino ratings, European and Indian officers; no alcohol at any time), cargo loading, rules for avoiding piracy, the approach to the Port of L.A. etc.
And Richard Hughes’ In Hazard (1938), the great novel of the logistics industry, recounts the fictional passage of a small British general-cargo vessel (Chinese ratings, U.K. and American officers) from Virginia into a gigantic Caribbean hurricane.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank Progressive Economy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
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