Malcolm McLean was impatient. In six short years, 1931 to 1937, the former gas station attendant had hurried to parlay a second-hand truck purchase into a reliable local transport business. Now he waited on a dock in Hoboken, New Jersey with a load of cotton from his native North Carolina.

Ahead of him, workers unloaded cargo piece by piece from other trucks, then hoisted the goods onto the ship, and moved them into place like a jigsaw puzzle. Ships, McLean knew, often needed to stay ten days in port to complete such loading. As the hours passed and other impatient men arrived behind him, McLean wondered why the workers could not simply lift his truck trailer directly and place it on the deck of the ship.

Over the next two decades, as McLean's trucking fleet grew to nearly two thousand vehicles, he refined his idea from conventional truck trailers to special steel boxes that could be stacked and layered in the hold. When he approached the major U.S. railroads with his container concept, however, they told him his idea had little merit. Undaunted, McLean tried to form his own firm to put idea into action. The Interstate Commerce Commission, at the behest of the railroads, blocked these efforts.

In 1955, the newly-christened McLean Industries purchased the small Pan Atlantic and Waterman steamship companies and converted the decks of two ships into trailer platforms. Finally, on April 26, 1956 a Pan Atlantic tanker dubbed the Ideal X sailed from Port Newark, New Jersey to Port Houston, Texas with 58 35-foot containers. The container era in world trade had begun.

McLean equipped the Ideal X's successors with cranes to pick up containers from the pier and lower them into subdivisions of the ships' holds called "cells." Each ship could carry 226 35-foot containers. In 1957, the company began regular service between New York, Florida, and Texas with the Sea-Land Gateway City, the first full-celled containership.

Container shipping grew dramatically in the 1960s as Sea-Land's competitors overcame their aversion to refitting their fleet and docks learned to accommodate the special needs of such ships. Container sizes and fittings standardized, ensuring any box could lock on to any other box, trailer chassis, or ship or plane cell. The administrator of New York Harbor encouraged construction of the world's first exclusive container terminal in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. Railroad companies, at last convinced of containerization's benefits, competed to carry the units cross-country on flatcars. MacLean later constructed Europe's first container port in Rotterdam in 1966.

Today, MaerskSealand, the latest reincarnation of MacLean Industries, operates offices in more than one hundred countries around the world. Its three hundred vessels carry at least ten times the cargo of any sixties-era ship, a total turnover of just under one million containers a year.