Malcom McLean solves a problem
- In 1937, during a routine delivery to the port in North Carolina for shipment, McLean had to stay behind until his cargo had been loaded onto the ship.
- He sat for hours watching dozens of hands load thousands of packages onto the ship. It was a diverse assortment of barrels, boxes, bags, crates, and drums. (A typical ship contained as many as 200,000 individual pieces of cargo and the time it took to load and unload the cargo often equaled the time that the vessel needed to sail between ports.)
- He realized the waste of time and money and wondered about a better alternative.
- He initially thought to load entire trucks onboard a ship but realized that it would waste cargo space.
- He modified his idea, so only the containers were loaded onto the ship, not the trucks' chassis. The containers were also designed to stack on top of one another.
49
194 reads
CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
The idea is part of this collection:
Learn more about history with this collection
Different Easter traditions around the world
The significance of Easter eggs and bunnies in modern culture
The importance of the holiday in the Christian faith
Related collections
Similar ideas to Malcom McLean solves a problem
Millions of space fans will blast their names to deep space
In another long-standing space tradition, NASA invited space fans to put their names onboard the Orion spacecraft. The names were submitted through an agency website and allowed ordinary folks to submit entries that were later loaded onto a flash drive stored on board the vessel....
Read & Learn
20x Faster
without
deepstash
with
deepstash
with
deepstash
Personalized microlearning
—
100+ Learning Journeys
—
Access to 200,000+ ideas
—
Access to the mobile app
—
Unlimited idea saving
—
—
Unlimited history
—
—
Unlimited listening to ideas
—
—
Downloading & offline access
—
—
Supercharge your mind with one idea per day
Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.
I agree to receive email updates