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Cronica Report Malcolm McLean

Malcolm McLean revolutionized international transportation in the 1950s by developing the modern shipping container, significantly reducing shipping costs. He witnessed the slow process of unloading loose goods from trucks at ports and wondered why the boxes couldn't stay on trucks. In 1956, he conducted the first containerized shipment by fitting a tanker with a deck to carry modified truck trailers. This was immediately successful, cutting costs by 25%. He later sold the idea to the military, helping establish modern global containerized shipping.

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100 views2 pages

Cronica Report Malcolm McLean

Malcolm McLean revolutionized international transportation in the 1950s by developing the modern shipping container, significantly reducing shipping costs. He witnessed the slow process of unloading loose goods from trucks at ports and wondered why the boxes couldn't stay on trucks. In 1956, he conducted the first containerized shipment by fitting a tanker with a deck to carry modified truck trailers. This was immediately successful, cutting costs by 25%. He later sold the idea to the military, helping establish modern global containerized shipping.

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omar andres rodriguez vera
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CHRONICLE REPORT MALCOM PURCELL MCLEAN

OMAR ANDRES RODRIGUEZ VERA

Foreign Trade Operations Technician


Ficha 2834667

ENGLISH COMPONENT
Instructor
Monica Nathalia Suarez Monroy

SENA
March 26, 2024

1
Malcolm Purcell McLean (November 14, 1913 - May 25, 2001) was an American
entrepreneur who developed the modern intermodal shipping container, revolutionizing
international transportation and trade in the second half of the 20th century. Subsequent
containerization led to a significant reduction in the cost of transporting goods by
eliminating the handling of individual parts, improving reliability, making theft more
difficult and reducing transport times.
In times around 1950, goods were transported by sea aboard freighters. But they were
loose, so the process of unloading the trucks, loading the goods and unloading them
again at the destination ports was a manual and time-consuming process. Sometimes,
depending on the volume and nature of the cargo, it could take several weeks.
Logically, this contributed to a considerable increase in freight costs. Malcolm McLean
was watching this slow and tedious process on the dock at the port of New Jersey. He
wondered why he couldn't just take the box from the truck carrying the goods and dump
it on the ship, instead of emptying it into smaller boxes. What McLean did was to
improvise modified chassis trailers measuring 33 feet or ten meters long as containers.
The first worldwide shipment of this type bore his signature, and took place in April
1956. On that voyage, 58 containers were moved from the port of Newark, New Jersey,
to Houston, Texas, aboard the SS Ideal-X. It was a World War II tanker and a typical
conversion of ships left over from the war effort. What the American entrepreneur did
was to fit the ship with a deck on which the containers could be transported safely. This
formula was an immediate success, as it enabled McLean to cut shipping costs by 25%.
But the most important move came in 1960, when McLean sold the idea of container
shipping to the military. The military saw McLean's idea as the solution to its problems in
shipping military equipment to Vietnam. Containerized shipping is much more efficient if
it is part of an integrated logistics system, so the U.S. Army was the ideal customer.
McLean benefited, as his ships returned with containers full of payloads from the world's
fastest growing economy, Japan. And so the trans-Pacific trade relationship began in
earnest. A relationship precipitated by a war that eventually ended up becoming the
basis of what is now the international trading system. Today, all maritime transport
management is directed from computers, which control each of the containers that
move through a global logistics system.

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