Philadelphia to Antwerp - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 7

In the 1950s, a trucking magnate named Malcolm McLean began to envision a new system. He wanted
to drive his eighteen-wheelers into a port and then just load the trucks' cargo-filled trailers (minus their
wheels and axles) directly onto a ship. He'd float this ship to a different city, thereby avoiding America's
increasingly traffic-choked highways, and unload the trailers onto a bunch of eighteen-wheelers waiting at
the other end.
On April 26, 1956—a date that may mark the Big Bang moment of globalization—McLean pulled off
the exact maneuver he'd planned. Under his watchful eye, a retrofitted tanker called the Ideal-X was filled
with cargo in the port of Newark. Instead of taking three days as it might have before, the loading process
lasted just eight hours, with a crane lifting truck trailers onto the ship's deck. The Ideal-X departed the same
day it loaded, and when it arrived in Houston its stacks of trailers were quickly and easily unloaded onto
waiting semis.
By McLean's calculations, his new container system reduced costs to just 3 percent of what they'd have
been on a similarly sized ship loaded with loose cargo. Much of the savings came from reduced labor re-
quirements: All those longshoremen wrangling individual items could be replaced by a few crane operators
lifting the containers. Containers cut down on pilfering, too, since the cargo was locked in boxes instead of
sitting out on pallets. And the whole process was markedly faster, of course.
In the wake of Ideal-X 's successful maiden voyage, container shipping spread to ports around the
world. The container's dimensions were eventually standardized for international use. These days, almost
everything gets shipped in containers. Take a look around your house—chances are, more than 90 percent
of what you see once spent some time inside a forty-foot-long corrugated metal box.
In Levinson's view, globalization simply could not have happened without containerization. Because
containers dramatically reduced shipping costs—to the point that they almost ceased to be a factor at
all—goods no longer had to be manufactured or assembled near the places they'd be sold. Factories and
warehouses could be placed anywhere in the world. Preferably (and here we begin to glimpse the dark side
of globalization) somewhere with very weak labor laws and easily exploited workers.
OUR fourth day at sea brings high excitement. In the morning, not far off the Grand Banks of Newfound-
land, we spot a whale breaching a few hundred yards from the port bow. (The instant Rebecca finally re-
linquishes the binoculars and I lift them to my eyes, the whale disappears beneath the surface and never
returns. Rebecca cackles.) Equally exciting: In the afternoon, we receive an invitation to tour the previously
off-limits engine room and navigation bridge.
Witold the electrician leads our engine room tour. He is wearing a stained, threadbare jumpsuit that pretty
clearly hasn't been laundered since the ship left port. He's zipped it open far down his sternum, allowing
his chest hair to erupt forth. When he leans in close, to make himself heard above the noise-baffling head-
phones he's asked us to wear, his breath and body odor envelop me in a rank cloud that I fear I might never
unsmell.
To get to the engine room, we follow Witold down stairways and ladders, lower and lower into the
bowels of the ship. As we descend, we begin to feel the humming of the engine inside our skulls. At last,
we reach the engine room door. “Welccchom to ccchyell!” Witold shouts gleefully, opening the hatch with
a blast wave of heat and rumble.
“Thees ees engine!” he shouts, once we've entered the two-story chamber that holds the behemoth. The
freighter's engine boasts seven cylinders and is roughly the size of a four-bedroom ranch house, but oth-
erwise isn't fundamentally different from the engine in your car. Instead of turning wheels, its driveshaft
turns the ship's single, enormous propeller. This simple operation burns 152,000 gallons of fuel per day.