Reading: True / False / Not Given: Question 10

Before the 1950s, loading and unloading a cargo ship was a slow, labour-intensive process. Goods arrived at the dockside individually packed in barrels, crates, and sacks of wildly varying shapes and sizes, and dockworkers known as longshoremen had to load each item into a ship's hold by hand, a process that could keep a vessel tied up in port for a week or more. Since ships earn revenue only while at sea carrying cargo, this idle time in port represented an enormous and largely unavoidable cost to shipping companies.

The solution came from an American trucking entrepreneur, Malcolm McLean, who reasoned that instead of unloading a truck's cargo piece by piece at the dock, the entire truck trailer, minus its wheels, could simply be lifted onto a ship as a single sealed unit. In 1956, McLean's converted tanker ship carried fifty-eight such metal containers from New Jersey to Texas, marking the first commercial container shipment. Within two decades, standardised steel shipping containers, built to a small number of internationally agreed sizes, had become the dominant method of moving manufactured goods around the world.

The economic consequences were far-reaching. Because containers could be loaded and unloaded by crane in a fraction of the time required for loose cargo, port turnaround times fell dramatically, and the cost of shipping a tonne of goods across an ocean dropped to a small fraction of its previous level. This collapse in transport costs made it economically viable for manufacturers to relocate factories to countries with lower labour costs while still shipping the finished goods cheaply to consumers thousands of miles away, a shift that many economic historians regard as one of the central enabling conditions of late twentieth-century globalisation.

Containerization also reshaped the geography of port cities themselves. Traditional docklands, once crowded with warehouses and dockworkers, were increasingly abandoned in favour of large automated terminals built on the outskirts of cities, where there was sufficient space for stacking containers and manoeuvring cranes. Many former dockside districts in cities such as London and New York were later redeveloped for housing and offices, since the jobs and infrastructure that had once defined them as working ports had moved elsewhere.

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage? Write TRUE, FALSE or NOT GIVEN.

1. Before the 1950s, ships typically spent a long time in port because cargo was loaded and unloaded by hand.
2. Malcolm McLean was a manufacturer of steel shipping containers before he began working in the shipping industry.
3. The first commercial container shipment carried fewer than one hundred containers.
4. Shipping containers are built in a wide variety of different sizes to suit individual shipping companies.
5. The fall in shipping costs made it economically practical for manufacturers to move production to countries with cheaper labour.
6. Container shipping reduced the number of shipping accidents at sea.
7. Former dockside areas in some cities have been redeveloped for housing and office use.
8. Malcolm McLean's company remained the largest shipping container operator in the world throughout the twentieth century.