IELTS Reading: Matching headings

It is made of corrugated steel, it has no engine and no moving parts apart from its doors, and most people pass hundreds of them without a second glance. Yet the shipping container has probably done more to shape the modern world economy than many inventions that are far better known. Almost every manufactured object in a typical home has spent part of its life inside one. To understand why such a simple object mattered so much, it is necessary to look at how goods travelled before it existed.

Until the second half of the twentieth century, most cargo was carried in what was known as break-bulk form. Sacks of coffee, barrels of oil, crates of machinery and bales of cotton were brought to the dockside one load at a time, and gangs of dockworkers lifted, carried and stacked each item in the ship's hold, fitting awkward shapes together as best they could. The work was slow, physically dangerous and expensive: a ship could easily spend as long being loaded and unloaded in port as it did at sea, and handling often made up a large share of the total cost of transport. Goods were frequently damaged, and theft was so common that it was sometimes described, only half jokingly, as one of the benefits of working on the docks.

The man most often credited with changing this was not a shipping expert but a trucking entrepreneur. Malcom McLean had built up a large road haulage business in the United States, and he knew how long his lorries could wait at the docks while their cargo was unloaded piece by piece. His solution was to lift the whole body of the trailer, with the goods still packed inside, off its wheels and on to a ship. Boxes of various kinds had been used to move freight before, but no one had built an entire transport system around them. In April 1956 a converted wartime tanker, the Ideal-X, sailed from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas, with 58 containers on its deck. By one widely quoted estimate, the cost of loading the ship was more than 90 per cent lower than it would have been for loose cargo.

The early success of container shipping created a new problem. Each company that adopted the idea designed its own boxes, in different lengths and with different fittings for lifting and locking them, so a container belonging to one firm could not be handled by another firm's cranes or carried on its ships. For a time it seemed possible that the industry would remain divided into incompatible systems. It took years of negotiation during the 1960s, involving shipping lines, manufacturers and governments, before international standards were agreed. Lengths of 20 and 40 feet became the norm, and a standard steel fitting at each corner allowed any container to be lifted by any crane and locked to any ship, lorry or railway wagon. Even today, the capacity of ships and ports is measured in 'twenty-foot equivalent units', or TEU.

Standard containers required a new kind of port. Instead of long piers lined with warehouses, a container terminal needed huge open areas where boxes could be stacked, giant cranes, deep water for ever larger ships, and good road and rail connections inland. Many historic ports, squeezed into the centres of old cities, simply had no room for these. In New York, traffic moved from the piers of Manhattan and Brooklyn to new terminals across the harbour in New Jersey. In Britain, the docks of east London declined, while Felixstowe, a small port on the Suffolk coast, grew to become the busiest container port in the country. In many cities the abandoned waterfronts were later redeveloped as offices, shops and housing.

The people who had worked on the old docks paid a heavy price. A container ship could be unloaded by a small team operating cranes in a fraction of the time that a large gang had once needed, and the number of dock jobs in major ports fell dramatically within a generation. Dockworkers' unions, which were powerful in many countries, resisted the change with strikes, and in some ports they won agreements that guaranteed pay or compensation for workers who were no longer needed. Such agreements softened the blow for individuals, but they could not preserve the close-knit waterfront communities that had grown up around the docks.

The wider effects were felt in trade itself. Because a container could travel from factory to ship to lorry without being opened, goods could be sent across the world cheaply, quickly and with little risk of loss. Manufacturers no longer needed to be close to their customers, and it became economical to make different components in different countries and assemble them in another. Measuring how much of the growth in world trade was due to the container is difficult, since many other things changed at the same time. However, when the trade economist Lena Vogt and her colleagues compared countries before and after they adopted container shipping, they concluded that its effect on trade between industrialised nations had been larger than that of all the trade agreements signed over the same period.

None of this means that the container alone created the global economy. Its impact depended on other developments, including computers that could keep track of millions of boxes and changes in regulation that allowed shipping lines to compete on price. The largest ships now carry more than 20,000 TEU, and when a single large container ship ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for several days in 2021, businesses on several continents felt the disruption. The humble box has made the world's economies more closely connected than ever before, and in doing so it has also made them more vulnerable to each other's problems.