Reading 1 — the shipping container

Sample question

Reading Passage — The box that changed what could be made where A For most of the history of seafaring, the slowest part of a voyage happened while the ship was standing still. Cargo arrived at the quayside as barrels, crates, sacks and bales, and gangs of dockworkers moved each item by hand and by net into the hold, where it had to be stacked so that nothing shifted in heavy weather. Loading a general cargo ship could take a week or more at each end of a voyage, and a vessel might spend as much of its working life tied up as it did at sea. The cost of all that labour, rather than the cost of the crossing itself, was what made sending goods abroad expensive. B The idea that eventually changed this did not come from a shipping company. Malcom McLean ran a trucking business in North Carolina, and what interested him was not ships but the hours his drivers lost waiting at the docks. If a loaded trailer could be lifted off its wheels and set straight onto a deck, the handling of individual items would disappear from the process altogether. In April 1956 a converted tanker renamed the Ideal X sailed from Port Newark in New Jersey to Houston carrying fifty-eight such boxes on a reinforced deck. Nothing about the voyage looked revolutionary at the time: the ship was old and the route was domestic. C What made the box work was not the box. A container is only useful if the crane that lifts it, the ship that carries it, the chassis that takes it away and the port on the other side of the ocean all expect the same object. Through the 1960s a series of standards fixed the dimensions, the strength of the corner fittings and the way the boxes lock together, settling on lengths of twenty and forty feet. Volumes are still counted in twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs — a measure that describes a shape rather than a weight or a value, which tells you something about what the industry had become. D Standardisation was resisted, and not unreasonably. Shipping lines that had already bought boxes of their own dimensions stood to lose that investment, and each argued that its own design should become the rule. Ports faced a harder calculation still. Container cranes, and the deep water and open land they require, are enormous investments that earn nothing at all until enough ships arrive to use them — and no line would commit its ships to a port until the cranes were already standing there. E The deadlock was broken partly by war. The American military's supply problem in Vietnam was precisely the problem containers solved: vast quantities of standardised goods moving one way over a very long distance. The contracts that followed gave the new ships guaranteed volume at a moment when little else did. Ships that would otherwise have crossed the Pacific empty on the return leg began calling at Japanese ports for cargo, and a route built to carry military supplies westwards started carrying manufactured goods east. F The consequences on land were as large as those at sea, and rather less expected. The old general cargo ports were in cities: narrow finger piers close to the warehouses, markets and workforce that served them. Container terminals need deep water, flat ground measured in tens of hectares, and a road and rail connection — and the places that had those things were rarely the places where the docks had always been. Within a generation the working waterfronts of several great port cities had emptied, while traffic moved to sites that had handled almost nothing before. G Economic historians now treat the container as one of the reasons the shape of world trade changed in the second half of the twentieth century. When moving a component across an ocean costs little and takes a predictable number of days, it becomes possible to make it in one country, assemble it in another and sell it in a third — a way of organising production that was not worth attempting while freight was slow and its cost hard to foresee. The box did not cause any of this on its own. What it did was remove a constraint that had bounded the whole arrangement. — Which heading best fits Paragraph C?

• An idea from outside the shipping industry
• A box is only as useful as everything that handles it
• The emptying of the old waterfronts
• Why ports hesitated to invest