Applied Creativity
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- 6 min read
In the summer of 1492 a small merchant ship and two tiny coastal vessels were being prepared for a voyage of discovery.
In a final, chaotic push hundreds of men worked furiously to fill the boats with 35,000 gallons of liquid (mostly sherry) in massive leaking wooden barrels, thousands of pounds of dried beans in sacks, thousands of slabs of salted meat, and 15 tons of tasteless hard biscuits in canvas bags were wedged in any dry gaps.
Every single item had to be carefully manhandled, shifted, crammed in, and balanced so the overloaded ships wouldn’t flip over as soon as they hit the high seas.
After months of preparation the final loading took two full weeks of continuous, back-breaking labour to load approximately 280 tons of provisions.
Finally, Christopher Columbus’s small fleet was ready to set sail and eventually stubble across the Americas.
Five Centuries Later…
Half a millennium later, in 1954 a modestly sized cargo ship named the SS Warrior was in New York preparing to sail to Germany.
She was being loaded up with 5,015 tons of cargo, and the process was almost identical to Columbus’s era.
The cargo was a chaotic mix of 194,582 individual items including barrels of liquids, sacks of flour, boxes of canned meat, and even whole vehicles:
No. of Items | Weight % | |
Case | 74,903 | 27.9% |
Carton | 71,726 | 27.6% |
Bag | 24,036 | 12.9% |
Box | 10,671 | 12.8% |
Bundle | 2,880 | 1.0% |
Package | 2,877 | 1.9% |
Piece | 2,634 | 1.8% |
Drum | 1,538 | 3.5% |
Can | 888 | 0.3% |
Barrel | 815 | 0.3% |
Vehicles | 53 | 6.7% |
Crate | 21 | 0.3% |
Transporter | 10 | 0.5% |
Reel | 5 | 0.1% |
Undetermined | 1,525 | 0.8% |
Total | 194,582 | 98.4% |
Longshoremen used hooks, pry bars, timber, and rope to manually lift, distribute and wedge every item into the ship’s hold.
Using almost the same methods of loading that were used almost 500 years earlier it took hundreds of men five days of intense labour to load the ship.
Then, after a 10-day journey across the Atlantic, it took another five days to reverse the whole process and unload the ship.
Loading and unloading the ship took exactly the same time as the journey itself.
The costs of all this manpower was enormous.
The 3,000 mile voyage itself was just 11% of the total costs of trade, but moving the goods a few hundred metres across the docks of New York and Germany racked up 50% of the bill.
Shipping goods internationally was slow and expensive which was why in 1954 world trade levels were less than 1% of today’s.
Thinking Inside the Box
In 1937 a 24-year-old truck driver called Malcom McLean sat in his cab in the Port of New York impatiently waiting for teams of longshoremen to load the bales of cotton from his trailer into a waiting ship.
“It struck me that I was looking at a lot of wasted time and money,” McLean later recalled in a 1996 interview. “The thought occurred to me, as I waited around that day, that it would be easier to lift my trailer up and, without any of its contents being touched, put it on the ship.”
Eighteen years later McLean had built his business into a major trucking company operating 1,700 vehicles.
He’d built his business by relentlessly optimising his routes and efficiencies, and he was looking to further slash the costs of transportation up the East coast when he remembered his dockside revelation.
If he could load his trailers directly on and off coastal ships he could undercut the costs of both his trucking competitors and traditional cargo shipping.
Then he recognised that if he could detach the cargo box from the wheels and chassis he could save even more space and money.
To test his idea he took the huge gamble to sell his trucking company and buy a struggling shipping line.
He hired a talented engineer called Keith Tatlinger to design the stackable containers.
He converted an oil tanker so that the new containers could be stacked on top.
And he bought in some old port-side cranes to load and unload the containers at either end.
On April 26, 1956, the SS Ideal X, the world’s first container ship, left New York after loading 58 containers in just eight hours.
McLean’s new method slashed port labour costs from $5.83 a ton to just 16 cents.
Container shipping was suddenly 94% cheaper and ocean transport changed from being a barrier to trade into a rounding error.
Malcom McLean’s invention revolutionised the world.
A modern mega-container ship carries 20 to 40 times more cargo than the SS Warrior, yet can load or unload completely within 24 to 48 hours.
The Eureka Illusion
Everyone wants to hear the story of the lone inventor and their ‘Aha’ moment and McLean was happy to supply it in his late interviews.
The only problem is that McLean’s 1937 dockside epiphany didn't happen.
Historian Marc Levinson, author of the definitive history of containerisation, The Box, points out, “I believe that the event never occurred. There is certainly no contemporaneous evidence for it.”
As Levinson notes: "I quickly learned that many people quite fancy the tale of McLean’s dockside epiphany. The idea of a single moment of inspiration, of the apple landing on Newton’s head, stirs the soul."
The truth is that shipping containers were not new.
They’d been used since the late 1700s in various forms.
The British and French railways used wooden containers to move furniture in the late nineteenth century.
Interchangeable truck bodies were being used in Cincinnati after WW1.
In 1926 there was a romantic first-class train called the Golden Arrow which travelled from London to Paris every evening, with the coaches crossing the Channel on a specially designed ship.
US and Canadian ships were using containers that could be moved into trucks in the 1930s.
The first container ships were launched in Denmark in 1951.
And in 1949 Keith Tatlinger, who McLean hired to design his boxes, had already designed a similar container that could stack on barges and transfer to a truck.
But all these efforts were small scale and made little impact on the world.
“Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments.” - Anish Kapoor
Thinking Outside the Box
The words Innovation and invention are often used interchangeably.
But they‘re not the same.
Invention is the creation of a totally new idea, process, or product.
It’s raw creativity.
Innovation is the practical application and scaling of that idea to make it useful and used.
It’s applied creativity.
Invention alone guarantees nothing.
Approximately 3.7 million patents are filed globally each year, but most of these epiphanies lead to nowhere.
The ideas that do breakthrough are made to happen through applied creativity.
The inventor can sometimes provide both the ideas and the follow-through, but more frequently the novel idea might come from one source and the realisation of that idea is actually down to someone else or a team of someone else's.
As Marc Levinson wrote, “the worshipful story of one person’s heroic effort is rarely an accurate representation of the complex path of technological advance.”
McClean didn’t create containers, but he was the innovator that made it work.
“Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off.” - Thomas Edison
Applied Creativity
All the previous attempts at containerisation had struggled because they created a box to operate within the existing system.
What McLean did differently was redesigning the whole system around the box itself.
His containers worked interchangeably across all ships, trains and trucks which dramatically increased the opportunity for efficiency.
Achieving scale was his next challenge.
In the mid sixties US were embroiled in the grinding Vietnam war, the distant military efforts were collapsing due to the "Saigon bottleneck."
Supply ships were stranded off the coast of Vietnam for months because the docks couldn't unload food, ammunition, and medical supplies fast enough.
760,000 tons of supplies were arriving in South Vietnam each month in a logistical mess of loose cargo and dockside labour limitations.
McLean approached the Department of Defense, offered his containers as the solution and took another financial risk, promising to build a new deep water terminal at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam.
He won a $70 million contract and created a new flow of cargo that took war supplies to Vietnam and brought back cheap consumer electronics back from Japan.
This success left McLean faced with another major challenge.
As competitors rushed into the market, everyone built their own versions of a container.
Trucking companies, train operators, docks and shipping companies didn’t know which style of container to build their operations around, so container use stalled.
For containerisation to really take over the world there needed to be standardisation.
For 10 years a committee of all the interested parties had been deadlocked over a standard design.
McLean solved the problem by giving up his patents allowing everybody to use his designs for free and it’s this design that is used across the world today.
McLean wasn’t a great inventor, but he was a great innovator.
Time and time again McLean focused his creativity on the entire ecosystem rather than just the object, and changed global commerce forever.
Today over 200 million shipping containers move more than $7 trillion worth of goods across the oceans each year.
“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” - Thomas Edison
U.S. National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, “The S. S. Warrior: An Analysis of an Export Transportation System from Shipper to Consignee”, Maritime Cargo Transportation Conference (U.S.) (1954)
Malcolm McLean Obituary, The Economist (2001)
Levinson, M., “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger”, Princeton University Press (2016)
“Malcom McLean; Pioneered Use of Shipping Containers”, Los Angeles Times, 2001
