Malcom McLean invented shipping containers

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pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The capacity of containerships and cranes, however, was determined by the quantity of containers rather than their weight, and by the mid-1960s ports and ship lines began to emphasize the number of containers they handled. Raw numbers proved problematic, because they failed to distinguish between empty containers and full ones, and between large containers and small ones. In 1968, the Maritime Administration began to report container traffic in standardized 20-foot equivalent units, or TEUs. A 40-foot container represents 2 TEUs, and one of Matson’s 24-foot boxes registered as 1.2 TEUs. Chapter 12 The Bigness Complex Malcom McLean sold his stock and quietly left the board of R.

There is certainly no contemporaneous evidence for it. I suspect that the story of McLean’s stroke of genius took on a life of its own as, decades later, well-meaning people asked McLean where the container came from. As I show in chapter 2, ship lines and railroads had been experimenting with containers for half a century before Malcom McLean’s trip to Jersey City, and containers were already in wide use in North America and Europe when McLean’s first ship set sail in 1956. Malcom McLean’s real contribution to the development of containerization, in my view, had to do not with a metal box or a ship, but with a managerial insight. McLean understood that transport companies’ true business was moving freight rather than operating ships or trains.

When the Europe-Australia conference set container rates in 1967, a year before containership service opened, it decreed that each commodity in a mixed container would be charged the per-ton rate for that commodity. The only way to find the correct rate was to open the container and weigh every single item inside.24 This economically illogical system could not last. Ship lines had no reason to care what was inside the containers they carried, and with rampant excess capacity they were willing to accept any payment that exceeded their cost to carry the container. By early 1967, Waterman Steamship, Malcom McLean’s former company, switched to a flat rate for shipments from the United States to southern Europe: $400 for a shipper-owned 20-foot container, $800 for a 40-foot container, regardless of the contents.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

Like Olympic snowboarders practicing moves in 2009 that were undreamed of in 2006 (such as the double-corked 1260—a spin cycle of three and a half rotations and two off-axis flips), or competitive surfers learning the next aerial maneuver, they know that today’s level of achievement will not be sufficient tomorrow. You might think that such goals are only for performers at the highest levels—Olympic athletes, CEOs, best-selling recording artists. But in truth they’re for everyone. In fact, one of our examples, Malcom McLean, who changed the way the world shipped everything with the introduction of the shipping container in 1946, started off driving a truck for someone else. It is no accident that these early examples of performance improvement come from various edges, because it is exactly at the edge that the need to get better faster has the most urgency. Incumbents at the core—which is the place where most of the resources, especially people and money, are concentrated, and where old ways of thinking and acting still hold sway—have many fewer incentives to figure out the world, or to discover new ways of doing things, or to find new information.

In Salesforce.com’s early years, for example, founder and CEO Marc Benioff painted a compelling view of how to reshape the software industry around a new form of delivery: software as a service. The Fung brothers revolutionized supply-chain practice in the apparel industry. Malcom McLean led Sea-Land to a preeminent position in the containerized shipping business by driving standardization around his innovative container designs. And Dee Hock helped Visa make an exemplary shaping move in the 1970s at a time when banks had gotten into difficulty by aggressively sending out preapproved credit cards (even to newborns and family pets) without the infrastructure needed to support such large-scale transactions, or to sufficiently guard against fraud.

Google’s AdSense platform uses technology to connect advertisers, content providers, and potential customers, but its real value consists in a set of protocols and practices governing how ads are submitted, presented, and paid for, enabling participants to generate value from the platform with minimal investment of time and effort and minimal oversight from Google. Malcom McLean, the founder of Sea-Land and a successful shaper of the global shipping industry, employed a very different kind of shaping platform to provide interaction leverage. He developed an innovative design for four corner fittings and twist-lock mechanisms on shipping containers. By making these designs available to the broader shipping industry, he encouraged a broader set of investments by port authorities, crane companies, and shipping companies that accelerated the adoption of containerized shipping.


pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

One of the most effective early ways of bringing order to what was a historically ramshackle industry—an industry unchanged in its operating principles since the Phoenicians loaded murex shells in Mogador three thousand years before and shipped them back to Tyre—was that taken in the mid-1950s, when an American trucking executive named Malcom McLean hit on the idea of packing cargoes into enormous steel boxes—shipping containers. Up until then, cargoes—whether they were bags of potatoes, bales of cotton, bottles of whisky, motorcars, or machine guns—had all been loaded deep into a ship’s hold by cranes, then stacked as best as their shapes and sizes would permit, by gangs of expensive, often corrupt, and rigorously unionized stevedores—in the kinds of scenes so memorably recorded by Elia Kazan in On the Waterfront. The advantage of using standard-sized containers, twenty or forty feet long, and into which makers and merchants packed their own goods at the factory or the farm, was that the boxes could be put onto trucks or railroad flatcars, taken to the dockside, and loaded swiftly by specially made cranes onto the upper parts of a waiting ship as well as down in the holds.

Those who retain a fondness for clipper ships, for quinquiremes, or even for dirty British coasters long rue the day that these boxy monstrosities, which must be among the most familiar emblems of today’s globalized world, were ever invented. But Malcom McLean—who tried his first ship out in the Atlantic Ocean, in April 1956, running a converted U.S. Navy tanker, the Ideal-X, from Newark to Houston, with fifty-eight containers—knew that in the shipping industry time was everything and money was everything, and that to load a ton of cargo by hand cost nearly six dollars, while to do so on a containerized ship—indeed, on the Ideal-X itself, that late spring day—cost only sixteen cents.

New rules have recently been put in place, in both the Baltic and the North Sea, limiting the amount of sulfur in marine diesel fuel, in the hopes of cutting pollution and lessening the possibility that the satellites will be able to spot the ship tracks from the clouds the vessels leave above them. The world-changing idea of placing marine cargoes into same-size steel boxes, and creating the so-called container ship, belongs unequivocally to a former truck driver from North Carolina, Malcom McLean. There are also some brand-new ideas. One that has gained some traction, literally, is to have an immense sail, or a spinnaker-like kite, that can be played out ahead of a great cargo vessel when the wind is right, to help tow her along even though her engines might be cut off.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

Corrupt Vietnamese generals often stole the most desirable items for themselves. Worse, most of the American soldiers who needed supplies were nowhere near Saigon. Getting them their gear from the docks required trucks driving on dirt roads for weeks, often in hostile territory. Desperate for better results, the U.S. Army hired Malcom McLean, the original innovator of container shipping, to build and operate a container port at Cam Ranh Bay. He had two conditions: each box would be packed with a single type of item, and each box would be packed for a specific unit, which would be responsible for returning it. Within months, McLean had solved the army’s logistics problem and shown the world what was possible with containerization.

Containerization also cut the opportunities for theft by longshoremen and teamsters, which explains why Scotch whisky exporters were among the earliest adopters. Moreover, container ships, unlike traditional cargo ships, could be loaded and unloaded simultaneously. When the first container ships were introduced, these innovations cut the time in port from days to hours. Ships now carry about ten times as many containers as they did in the 1960s, but the biggest ones still spend far less time in port than the typical freighter in the precontainer era. American entrepreneurs began commercializing container transport in the late 1950s, but even after demonstrating the potential for cost savings and speed, the idea did not fully catch on until the 1980s.

There was no sense in producing goods for export unless the customer had already ordered it, and there was little reason to order goods from abroad unless local substitutes were literally unavailable. Prepacking goods at the factory into standardized metal containers revolutionized this process. The same box could be used interchangeably across all modes of transportation. Trucks and trains could arrive at a port, drop off their cargo, get new containers, and roll off to their next destination in a matter of minutes. Even heavy containers could be moved quickly and safely by a handful of people using cranes. The hard work of packing and unpacking would only be done at the beginning and end of the entire trip, rather than at the beginning and end of each leg.


pages: 401 words: 119,488

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently. When I was working on this book, I came upon a story that I loved, one of my favorite bits of reporting. The tale involved Malcom McLean, the man who essentially created the modern shipping container. McLean died in 2001, but he left behind videotapes and numerous records, and I spent months reading about him, as well as interviewing members of his family and dozens of his former colleagues. They described a man who had relentlessly chased an idea—that shipping goods inside of big metal boxes would make docks more productive—and how that insight eventually transformed manufacturing, the transportation industry, and the economies of whole continents.

Less than a quarter mile away, in another portion of the sea that seemed essentially the same, that diversity would plummet and you might find only one or two kinds of coral and plants. Similarly, some pockets of Australia’s rain forests contained dozens of different types of trees, lichen, mushrooms, and vines flourishing side by side. But just a hundred yards away, that would dwindle to just one species of each. Connell wanted to understand why nature’s diversity—its capacity for creative origination—was distributed so unevenly. His quest began in the Queensland rain forests: 12,600 square miles that contain everything from forest canopies to eucalyptus groves, as well as the Daintree tropical forest, where conifers and ferns grow right at the edge of the sea, and the Eungella National Park, where trees are so dense that, at ground level, it can be nearly lightless in the middle of the day.

They hadn’t become less intelligent or less aware of the world. Their old personalities were still inside, but there was a total absence of drive or momentum. Their motivation was completely gone.” II. The room where the experiment was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh was painted a cheery yellow and contained an fMRI machine, a computer monitor, and a smiling researcher who looked too young to have a PhD. All participants in the study were welcomed into the room, asked to remove their jewelry and any metal from their pockets, and then told to lie on a plastic table that slid into the fMRI. Once lying down, they could see a computer screen.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

In addition, labour relations were poor and strikes were common: dockers’ wages could eat up half the costs of an ocean voyage.48 Indeed, an academic study found that “the handling of cargo was almost as labour-intensive after World War II as it was during the beginning of the Victorian Age”.49 In the 1950s, a businessman called Malcom McLean tried to tackle the inefficiencies of the industry. He wanted the containers carried on his company’s trucks to be loaded straight on to ships. But this required wholesale changes in the design of ships, the operation of docks, and the working conditions of dockers; something that was bound to be opposed by the unions. So he established a new port in Newark, New Jersey, on the other side of the river from Manhattan. On April 26th 1956, the first container ship, SS Ideal-X, set off for Houston, Texas. Cranes that could lift the boxes on and off the redesigned ships had to be installed.

Then the product is sent by truck to distribution centres and eventually stacked on shelves by retail employees. And then think big. Travel to a container port, like Felixstowe in Suffolk, on England’s east coast, and you are in a land of giants. When I visited, a Maersk container ship, around 400 metres long, was ready to depart the dock. Its deck was filled with metal containers piled eight high; as many containers were below deck as above it. Three cranes, 80 metres tall, sat idly alongside. Their loading job was done. Within a few weeks, thousands of consumers would be using stuff taken from one of those containers. The world economy involves this mixture of the big and the small on a daily basis.

It is admittedly a very small farm; a converted container of the kind that fills the world’s merchant ships. Inside the box you can find lettuce, kale, flowers, even wasabi; all growing in a carefully temperature-controlled environment. As you enter the container, the first thing you see is a set of trays. Seeds have been planted in them, inserted into small plugs of peat moss. Above the trays are a series of plastic containers filled with nutrients that are being drip-fed to the plants through pipes. The seeds grow in these trays for two to three weeks before moving to the back half of the container where they hang vertically.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

The revolution was instigated by someone largely unknown in China and indeed the rest of the world—an entrepreneur from a small North Carolina town once known as Shoe Heel. Yet Malcom McLean, otherwise known as “Idea-a-Minute” McLean, is one of the most consequential figures in the history of transportation. Starting off with a tiny trucking company that he built into a major enterprise, McLean went on to unleash the container revolution in world shipping that is the foundation of today’s global economy. There is nothing romantic or flashy about a container; it is a steel box that might be twenty or forty feet long and eight and a half or nine and a half feet high.

It was the spread of this innovation, and the networks and system that implemented it, that integrated East Asia into the world economy.2 In 1980, the year Deng began his reforms, McLean initiated the first container service to China. Two years later, the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company launched container service to the West Coast of the United States. China’s rapid economic growth would not have been possible without the container fleets to carry its goods to global markets with very little additional cost. This applied both to goods manufactured in China and the supply chains for which it was the hub. Seven of the world’s top ten container ports too are Chinese—Shanghai the largest—and China normally accounts for over 40 percent of the world’s container shipments. Trade in turn is almost 40 percent of China’s GDP, making that flow of exports outward, and the flow of oil and other commodities inward, essential for economic growth and indeed the foundations of political and social stability.

Yet the “core” countries could be narrowed down to a much smaller number that have signed “comprehensive strategic partnerships” with China.12 Khorgas, once a crossing point through the mountains on the ancient Silk Road, is today the site on the Chinese-Kazakh border of a giant “land port,” a huge railway and transport hub that will speed containers from China on to Europe. Regular train service already delivers containers of Chinese goods to Europe in about half the time it takes for a container ship, though at higher cost. The first regular freight train service to the Middle East reached Tehran in 2016. China is spearheading a $6 billion high-speed railroad project punching through mountains in Laos that will connect China with seven countries and will at some points require tens of thousands of Chinese workers on location.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Each part increased in bulk till he became a mountain, and heaven with all its stars rests upon his shoulders. —Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology FEBRUARY 28, 2013 Any idea who Malcom McLean was? I bet not. But that one man changed our economy more than practically anyone else in the twentieth century. McLean was the inventor of the intermodal container, those metal boxes piled into immense heaps on the cargo ships coming from China. The genius of the container is that the entire workflow around transporting physical goods is standardized on the same 8×8×40 box. Manufacturers load goods onto eight-foot-wide palettes straight into the box.

It’s containerization applied to paid media, and in general, it works. But there are some ships that consider themselves either too big or too important to accept containers—either because they don’t like the look of them on the deck, or because they claim that moving freight is really a side business and not their mission in life. So if you want to move anything through them, you suddenly have to repack everything in whatever arbitrary, random containers these ships accept. This situation is what we politely call “native ad formats” in the ads business. Those ships are products like Google Search, Facebook, and Twitter.

Then it displays the associated ad that the advertiser has created and uploaded to Google for that keyword. Actually printing physical money would be harder. So how many such search queries, or “keywords,” in Google-speak, are there? The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, released in 1989 and since supplemented, contains 291,000 word entries. The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, a dictionary of the Dutch language and the largest monolingual dictionary in the world, runs to 50,000 pages and 431,000 entries. Both works are dwarfed by the size of the keyword lists maintained by those lexicographers turned word merchants, the search engine marketers.


pages: 650 words: 155,108

A Man and His Ship: America's Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa

8-hour work day, big-box store, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, interchangeable parts, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Mercator projection, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, trade route

Top Navy brass began to feel that Gibbs & Cox was “trailing the field, with only a joint General Electric nuclear contract to show.”3 Commercial shipping, meanwhile, was also undergoing a revolution. Until the mid-1950s, cargo had to be offloaded from trains and trucks, hauled to the pier, and lowered into cargo holds. Shipping entrepreneur Malcom McLean’s Sea-Land company changed that by developing a logistical breakthrough called containerization. This was a method by which a sealed container could be lifted directly from trucks and trains and lowered onto a vessel’s deck, and vice versa. Containerization saved shippers a lot of time and money, in large part because it eliminated the need for armies of longshoremen.

He knew all along that all of the freight and passenger traffic coming into New York could be monopolized if the piers could be directly tied into the Pennsylvania Railroad and the LIRR. After his secretary told him about his uninvited visitors, Peters strode out of his office, his rosy face showing a big smile. As Peters thumbed through a black leather-bound volume containing the proposal, he said he loved the idea of a Montauk terminal. But when he saw the superliner design, his eyes bulged. It was huge. Not only that, but its proposed turbo-electric power plant had the stamp of approval from William Emmet and its hull by none other than Admiral David W. Taylor. The railroad man stared intently at the two young men and asked what engineering qualifications they had.

Commissioner Grenville Mellon, the man who signed the superliner construction contract, admitted that he understood “only vaguely the procedures involved in the staff’s calculations, [and] he claimed to have detected in them mathematic errors which he failed to correct because they ‘were all recited, they were in the record.’”39 Congressman Dawson could barely contain his rage. “You are not given a blank check,” he said, “to say ‘I believe this is convincing, and upon this I am going to do as I please with the Government money.’”40 The commissioner who completely broke ranks was Raymond McKeough, who now rehashed all the objections he had made before finally voting to approve the contract.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

While the trucking industry itself fueled American productivity, it also had significant spillover effects on transportation and trade more generally. In conjunction with the rise of the trucking industry, the container revolution was an engine of postwar growth. And containerization emerged directly from trucking. Malcom McLean, a trucking entrepreneur, invented the container as a mean of integrating the segmented industries of shipping, trucking, and railroads. The first successful container shipment dates from April 26, 1956, when McLean’s Ideal-X made its maiden voyage from Port Newark to Houston, Texas. This seemingly unspectacular shipment was, together with Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World, one of the key events in the history of trade.

Bernhofen, Z. El-Sahli, and R. Kneller, 2016, “Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade,” Journal of International Economics 98: 36–50. 75. G. Horne, 1968, “Container Revolution Hailed by Many, Feared by Others,” New York Times, September 22. 76. Ibid. 77. “The Humble Hero: Containers Have Been More Important for Globalisation Than Freer Trade,” 2013, Economist, May 18, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2013/05/18/the-humble-hero. 78. R. H. Richter, 1958, “Dockers Demand Container Curbs,” New York Times, November 27. 79. Ibid. 80. On the federal court’s dismissal, see D.

In the same way that railroads and steamships paved the way for the first wave of globalization—which abruptly ended with World War I—containerization was the technology that underlay the second wave of globalization, beginning in the postwar years. According to a recent study, the container boosted bilateral trade by 320 percent over the first five years of its adoption.74 The container did not just change the world of trade. Containerization was a driver of Smithian and Schumpeterian growth alike. Contemporaries hailed it as “an extension of our mass production techniques into the carrying of overseas trade.”75 Besides eliminating twelve separate handling steps in the moving of goods between the manufacturer and the consumer, container terminals are estimated to have increased the volume a dock laborer was able to handle from 1.7 to 30 tons per hour.76 Although the construction of such terminals was capital intensive, faster rates of throughput saved substantial amounts of capital—not to mention the capital savings associated with the associated decline in theft.


pages: 757 words: 193,541

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan

active measures, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, continuous integration, correlation coefficient, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, delayed gratification, DevOps, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Google Glasses, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intermodal, Internet of things, job automation, job satisfaction, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, level 1 cache, load shedding, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine readable, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, place-making, platform as a service, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sorting algorithm, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The future is already here, Toyota Production System, vertical integration, web application, Yogi Berra

Customs could approve all the items in a particular container and seal it, eliminating the need for customs checks at remaining hops on the container’s journey as long as the seal remained unbroken. As other modes of transportation adopted the standard shipping container, the concept of intermodal shipping was born. A container would be loaded at a factory and remain as a unit whether it was on a truck, train, or ship. All of this started in April 1956, when Malcom McLean’s company SeaLand organized the first shipment using standardized containers from New Jersey (where Tom lives) to Texas. (Levinson 2008)

Solaris containers, called Zones, can be allocated network interfaces and have their network bandwidth regulated to control bandwidth resource contention. Containers on Linux can assign a different amount of disk cache to each container so that one container’s buffer thrashing will not affect the buffers of another container. Processes in a container are isolated in other ways. A container can kill or otherwise interact with only processes in its container. In contrast, processes that are not in containers can kill or interact with all processes, even ones in individual containers. For example, the shell command ps, when running in a FreeBSD container (called a “jail”), displays only processes running in that container. This is not a parlor trick; the container has no visibility to other processes.

This is not a parlor trick; the container has no visibility to other processes. However, when the same command is run on the host from outside any container, it shows all processes, including those inside the each container. Thus, if you are logged into the main host (no particular container), you have global visibility and can serve as administrator for all containers. Each container has its own copy of the packages, shared libraries, and other supporting files that it requires. Two containers running on the same machine cannot have dependency or version conflicts. For example, without containers one program might require a particular version of a library while another requires a very different version and cannot operate with the other version installed.