#Container September 7

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

This month the #Coach4adayChallenge for September is to profile a biography of someone. My choice for today is the man who revolutionized the CONTAINER shipping industry. He just happens to have been born in Robeson County NC and lived during tough economic times.

Malcom McLean who was born in Maxton, NC in 1914. McLean was actually born with his name being Malcolm but changed it to Malcom to adhere to a more authentic Scottish spelling.

He finished high school during The Great Depression and in 1935 with a used truck he started a trucking company called McLean Trucking with his sister Clara McLean and brother Jim McLean. That first company was located in Red Springs NC.

His resourcefulness enabled him to expand to thirty trucks by 1940, and he was eventually able to sell McLean Trucking, a $12 million company with over 1700 trucks, by the mid-1950s.

Invention of the Container method of shipping

McLean’s years in the transportation business showed McLean the need for an easier method of shipping goods. He had watched dock workers unloading goods from trucks and transferring them to ships, and marveled at the inefficiency of the process. That inefficiency generate his idea and invention of container shipping.

In 1955, he gambled big on a container venture, buying two oil tankers and securing a bank loan to buy $42 million worth of docking, shipbuilding, and repair facilities. He called his new company Sea-Land.

He refitted the two ships he purchased and designed trailers to stack below or on the decks. In April 1956, his first container ship, the Ideal X, departed Port Newark, New Jersey, headed for Houston. Ironically the ship was often referred to as the USS Maxton in reference to his birthplace.

McLean’s cargo shipped faster and cheaper, because loading and unloading were shortened at each end of the voyage. The sealed cargo reduced the pilfering that went on at various stages of the cargo’s journey and also reduced the labor required.

Nearly every imported consumer good imaginable owes its lower price to the CONTAINER revolution. McLean sold Sea-Land for $160 million in 1969. He died in 2001 and is recognized as one of the most innovative people in the history of world transportation.

Not bad for a truck driver who was born in Maxton, NC, started a business in Red Springs NC, and grew up in The Depression. People can overcome their environment.