[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Containerization is the shift from loose “break-bulk” cargo, loaded piece by piece by hand, to a standardized steel box moved as a single sealed unit from ship to truck to rail. Malcolm McLean ran the first container voyage in 1956; ISO standardization of box dimensions and corner fittings in the 1960s made the unit truly intermodal, so cargo is packed once at origin and unpacked once at destination. This crushed the dominant cost of shipping — port labor — and the theft and delay that came with manual handling, and it is the enabling technology for modern global trade measured in TEUs. The same scale logic drove ever-larger ships, which is why the technology’s economics are tied to the safe, high-volume seas discussed in Global Shipping. Seeded from Global Shipping.