On 26 April 1956 the converted tanker Ideal X left Newark, New Jersey, for Houston with 58 aluminium truck bodies on its deck, the idea of the trucking entrepreneur Malcolm McLean, who thought that goods should travel in standard boxes that could be lifted from lorry to ship to train without being unpacked. Loading cost fell from about 5.86 dollars a ton to 16 cents. The adoption of standard sizes by the International Organization for Standardization in the 1960s and the Vietnam War shipping boosted it. Containers made shipping so cheap and quick that they drove globalisation, and now carry about 90 per cent of non-bulk cargo.
Before and after
- 5 January 1956Birth of Frank-Walter Steinmeier
- 25 February 1956Publication of On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
- 1 March 1956Birth of Dalia Grybauskaitė
- 9 March 19561956 Georgian demonstrations
- 26 April 1956The first container ship sails
- June 1956Poznań 1956 protests
- 9 July 1956Birth of Tom Hanks
- 31 July 1956Construction of Luzhniki Stadium
- 11 August 1956Death of Jackson Pollock
More in Science & technology
- 1945Invention of computer
- 1964Discovery of rutherfordium
- 29 October 1969Invention of Internet
- 1984Discovery of hassium
- 15 January 2001Wikipedia
- 20 October 2004Creation of Ubuntu
The era
This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.