ss ideal x (13. 386)

The refurbished WWII T2 class “navy oiler” manufactured originally by the Marinship Corporation at the shipyard in Sausaltio California as the Potrero Hills and purchased by Malcolm McLean, who used this demonstration project to refine the concept of the intermodal shipping container that he had invented—revolutionising freight transport, undertook her first voyage with the new configuration on this day in 1956, carrying a cargo fifty-eight standardised boxes from the Port of Newark in New Jersey to the Port of Houston in Texas, where the boxes were offloaded to awaiting trailer trucks. The first commercially successful container ship, by organising and grouping what’s call bulk break goods—that is manufactured items for distribution, warehousing and retail sale, as opposed to dry bulk like grain, containerisation made the stevedoring process far more efficient, the concept copied and expanded to a fleet of fifty thousand ships today operating worldwide, adopting industry uniforms in part a wartime legacy from the US (see previously) and transporting some ninety percent of exports.