Researched
Container Ship
Malcolm McLean ships the first containers on 26 April 1956 - transhipment in port gets cheap, world trade grows.
Open in the interactive tree →The Ideal X carried 58 containers from Newark to Houston. The 1968 ISO standard made containers interchangeable worldwide, and loading costs dropped sharply. Today ships with over 24,000 containers (TEU) carry most of the world's general cargo.
Prerequisites
- Steamship1807
- Screw Propeller & Iron Hull1843Container ships are large steel-hulled screw-driven ships
- Suez & Panama Canals1869-1914Canal routes set the shipping lanes and ship sizes of world trade
- Internal Combustion Engine1876
- Diesel Engine1897Container ships run on large marine diesel engines
- Mass Production (Assembly Line)1913
- Pallet & Forklift1917-1945Pallets made cargo a unit load; the container took the same idea to whole ships
- International Standards (ISO)1947ISO container standards of 1968 let boxes move between ships, trains and trucks worldwide
Unlocks
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