The Box - Engine

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INGENIEURE
April 2012
HISTORY AUDIO-DATEI
The Box
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History
Audio-Datei
The Box
Eine einfache Kiste hat unsere Weltwirtschaft verändert. Doch obwohl der Container ein gutes Beispiel für pragmatische Kontruktionskunst ist, ist es weniger die Technik
als die Idee, die so revolutionär war.
When the converted oil tanker Ideal-X arrived
in the Port of Houston on May 1, 1956, no one
imagined the global change it foreshadowed.
Longshoremen stopped work and ran to the edge
of the dock to watch. So did businessmen who
had flown from the port of origin in Newark,
New Jersey. One witness said, “We had seen
thousands of tankers in Houston, but never one
like this. So everybody looked at this monstrosity and they couldn’t believe their eyes.” But it
wasn’t the ship itself that captured the onlookers’ attention. It was the many metal boxes
strapped to the deck, each roughly the size of a
truck trailer.
In his book ‘The Box’, Marc Levinson tells
the history of those unpretentious crates. “What
is it about the container that is so important?”
writes Levinson, “Surely not the thing itself. A
soulless aluminium or steel box held together
with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and
two enormous doors on one end: the standard
container has all the romance of a tin can.”
In fact, engineers find much to admire. From
the design of the corner-posts to the stacking
brackets, shipping containers display the finest
elements of “here’s-a-problem-let’s-solve-it”
engineering.
But the true marvel of the shipping container
was how it changed the engineering of the
world economy. Before 1956, packages were
loaded by hand. As a result, ships spent weeks
in port – far more time than they spent at sea.
Today, huge cranes unload a standard shipping
container and return to retrieve another in under
two minutes, allowing huge vessels to dock and
sail in less than a day. When the Ideal-X first
sailed, the cost of loading loose cargo was six
dollars a ton. That plummeted to a mere 16 cents
with the use of shipping containers.
Great as these savings were, we didn’t feel
the full impact of container shipping until it
spread throughout the supply chain. Trucks and
trains were quick to adopt standardized containers. Even manufacturers embraced shipping
practices that capitalized on the economies of
working “within the box.” Industrial engineers
and operations researchers stepped up with insightful new mathematics to take full advantage
of the efficiencies created by containerization.
www.engine-magazin.de
business
modified
importance
Harbour
indicated
harbour workers
observers
fastened
simple boxes
2x *see list
*see list
take pleasure in
*see list
wonder
get
ships
freight
dropped ... just
*see list
welcomed
took advantage of
benefit
welcomed
In less than 50 years – practically overnight for
such a capital-intensive enterprise – transportation and manufacturing were completely
re-engineered.
Great ports that failed to see the coming
change disappeared, while others grew to
international prominence. Singapore, one of the
world’s smallest countries and the world’s
largest container-port, hosted 148 cargo ships
per day in 2005, moving the equivalent of 23
million, 20-foot containers during the year. With
thousands upon thousands of containers in port
at any given time, a drive along the waterfront
is a spectacle as impressive as a shuttle launch.
Shipping containers are now part of our daily
lives. We pass them on highways – count them
as they go by at train crossings. They’re the bits
and bytes of an international trade network
they created. And the true genius they represent
is less the box itself than it is the genius of catching an idea whose time has come. n
Dr. Andrew Boyd
admire, to
advantage
capitalize, to
cargo
convert, to
crate
embrace, to
enterprise
foreshadow, to
host, to
longshoreman
marvel
mere
plummet, to
port
prominence
retrieve, to
rivet
stacking bracket
strap, to
supply chain
tin can
unpretentious
vessel
weld
witness
bewundern, verehren
Vorteil
ausnutzen, Kapital schlagen
Ladung, Fracht
umrüsten, umbauen
Kiste
annehmen, ergreifen
Geschäft, Unternehmung
ahnen lassen
beherbergen, aufnehmen
Hafenarbeiter
Wunder
nur, bloß
stürzen, fallen
Hafen
Bedeutung, Wichtigkeit
holen gehen, abrufen
Niet
Stapelwinkel
an-, festschnallen
Liefer-, Versorgungskette
Blechdose
schlicht, bescheiden
Schiff, Fahrzeug
!
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