The Box

I just read "The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson. It is a description of the history of the cargo container shipping industry.

I know how dry this sounds, but in this and future posts I will attempt to combine information presented in that book, with my own ideas about the almost immeasurable impact this simple and seemingly obvious technology has had on society present and future.

What just stirred me to post on this was watching Bruce Springsteen record "Erie Canal" for his latest CD, We Shall overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Highly recommended tinyurl.com/rn4g4

Beside the awkward fact that Erie Canal is a love song to a mule, the lyrics echo back to a time when production, and cities, had to be near the best possible shipping. Here are the lyrics:

I've got a mule, her name is Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal

She's a good old worker and a good old pal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day

filled with lumber, coal and hay

And we know every inch of the way from Albany to Buffalo.

Chorus:

Low bridge, everybody down

Low bridge for we're coming to a town

And you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal

If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal.
We better get along on our way ol'gal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal

'Cause you bet your life I'd never part with Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal.

Git up there mule, here comes a lock,We'll make Rome about 6 o'clock

One more trip and back we'll go, right back home to Buffalo.

Albany, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, New York grew because they were on the water. Factories, even in New York, were blocks from the docks because the cost of transportation was so high that it was economical to locate manufacturing facilities in prime locations.

Our ability to move goods has fundamentally determined where our cities are. Where people live and work.

The Box - the standardized multimodal shipping container - has totally changed that. Wherever you are, be it Buffalo or a suburb of Beijing, you can manufacture to your hearts delight and stuff your goods in cheap, secure boxes. When full these get pulled by a truck to a rail yard, and then on to a domestic destination (with the last leg back on a truck) or to a port for a trip overseas on a ship carrying 2999 more boxes.

The industrial revolution made it easy to concentrate physical power in a way previously impossible, and reduced the cost of such power so greatly as to be economically irrelevant in most cases.

The current information revolution is doing the same thing to data - previously unimaginable amounts of information can be transported anywhere, basically for free.

Both of these changes created incredible wealth, and did or will change how people live their lives.

My thesis is that The Box - an ugly, cheap, low-tech innovation if ever there was one - has had a similar effect. And more importantly, is becoming more and more important. Multi-modal transportation really is the super highway of stuff. And when stuff can be moved fast and cheap it changes where you make stuff, how much stuff you get, and even how you view stuff.

I know this post is very conclusory. More to come.