Thread by @authorAneesh

What made China the cheap manufacturing behemoth ?

The Shipping Container.

Thread .

Till the 1950s, cargo would be loaded on ships in boxes , bales , crates , rolls , plates etc.

A Chief Mate's nightmare and very time consuming too.

It would require hundreds of stevedores to load a ship.

Consequently ships stayed in Port for days on end.

This is what shipping had been since past two hundred years, with some innovations like the Derrick (a forerunner of today's cranes)

Enter Malcolm McLean , owner of a truck firm in the United States.

He found the time taken to take goods off and on a ship irritating. Since his trucks would be lying idle all that time.

Last straw was in 1937, when a ship in New York took over a month too load cargo for Istanbul.

This also meant valuable warehouse space occupied , or cargo getting spoilt by lying in the open.

Then the War happened, and everything else stopped. The war also saw the US deliver " Liberty Line" ships - no frills, pre fabricated, welded structure as opposed to the rivetted ships of before. That was another turning point, but not related here.

At the end of the war, the US Navy found itself with a huge surplus stock of supply vessels etc.

A tanker named Petrero hills was purchased and converted by McLean

Rechristened Ideal X - it loaded truck chasis at New Jersey sailed to Houston , offloaded those chasis and attached them to waiting trucks.

In one stroke thousands of man-hours had disappeared !

This container ship forerunner also afforded another luxury - stacking cargo on the exposed weather deck. So more cargo can be carried.

Still, stacking truck chassis was cumbersome.

A solution was found by Keith Tantliger , who worked with McLean to solve this problem

An automatic twist lock was invented, enabling containers to stack one on another

Pic : Keith Tantliger

The new ship " Gateway city" could also stack containers inside a ship, as also outside.

Doesnt it look familiar ? It carried 220 containers in 1957.

Earlier, in the pre container era cargo would cost 6 dollars a ton to load. Now it cost 16 cents !

A lot of this cost was transporting, storage and loading on ship. Salaries paid to hundreds of workers etc.

And the shipping world jumped at the opportunity 😊

No they did not, surprisingly. Old shipping lines like Holland America believed Container Ships were unfit for sea.

But in 1966, the SS Fairland crossed the Atlantic carrying containers and the new age was here to stay

Few years later, a container ship safely carried good ol' scotch from Europe to America and Bourbon whiskey the other way

General Cargo ships of yore were seeing their grave.

Soon standardization into 20ft / 40ft container followed. Thus any container anywhere could be stacked with any other container.

With the costs of transportation and storage brought down drastically. Countries which could deploy cheap manufacturing and labour scored big.

It became more profitable to manufacture in China ,transport to the dock and ship in bulk across the sea

Container terminals like Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia sprung up.

Earlier the cost of transporting and storage and loading/ offloading offset any labour cost incentives. No longer.

The container enabled bulk shipping in enormous quantities. A container full of toys , chairs , wine bottles - China aced the shipping cost business.

It has actually come to a stage - where if you are in Europe, it is cheaper to source a spare part from China and ship it than procure locally.