Malcom McLean

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Malcolm McLean changed the world economy.

The way shipping worked is people would bring all the different things they'd want to ship to the dock and all in cars and trains and trucks.

And then at the dock, it could take up to a week to load a ship.

The big shipping companies probably made more money from it, but they were already big shipping companies when they did it.

The guy who invented shipping containerization or invented, so maybe the wrong word, but made it happen, Malcolm McLean, he actually made some money from it.

And so did his sole venture investor.

And then he sold the company to RJR and made a bunch of money.

Everybody saw the idea and said, this is a great idea.

This is going to be the future.

If this guy can get past all the hurdles that have been put in place to making it happen, then it's obviously going to be something that everybody's going to use and be a huge amount of value in it.

So we all need to do it.

So what does that mean? This goes back to an excellent book by Mark Levinson called The Box, which talks about the impact that storage containers, those sort of very long 20-foot rectangular steel things that you see on ocean liners and ships, it's just a sort of book about this kind of boring but very impactful quote-unquote technology that fundamentally changed logistics and trade throughout the world.

It was a guy called Malcolm McLean.

He was a truck driver.

He sat at the port in New York, I believe, in the 1950s and couldn't believe that there were these longshoremen that were sort of moving goods and potatoes and wares and manufacturing equipment sort of on their backs from the truck and repacking it back onto a ship.

Okay.

So in the past, when you wanted to ship a container or cargo anywhere, from one location to the other you would cost you a lot over five dollars per ton and this is because everything was in different formats different sizes and different shapes and so to just get it on and off a ship had to be handled so many times and moved around there was no standardization then in 1956 i think it was malcolm mclean created the container box like the container box the cargo box right what they're called so this metal box that is standardized and all shipping goes because he wasn't anything necessarily special in his background he was a um he ran a truck and a freight business Um, and he was like a truck hauler and he was hauling products around.

He's like, this is taking way too long.

I'm just waiting here for this cargo to come through.