Shipping: Better by the Box

Theoretically protected by $416 million a year in federal subsidies, the U.S. maritime industry has been drifting toward economic shipwreck for 20 years. Partly because the Government pays 72¢ out of every $1 in wages earned aboard subsidized ships, their operators have felt little spur to cut costs and improve services. Some of the sharpest criticism comes from the inside. Says Vice President Joseph A. Medernach of Moore-McCormack Lines: “The industry is one of the most backward, stodgiest and stuffiest businesses around.”

Now, with the increasing popularity of jet air freight, along with the promise of truly gigantic cargo planes within a few years, U.S. shipping companies have finally, and belatedly, begun to battle back. The weapon on which they pin the most hope: a technique called container shipping. A seagoing adaptation of piggyback rail freight, container shipping involves packing cargo into steel, aluminum or wood containers of more or less standard size (8 ft. high, 8 ft. wide and 10, 20, 30 or 40 ft. long) at the factory, no matter how far inland. The containers are then moved by truck or train to a port city and loaded aboard a ship built especially to accommodate them or so adapted. Upon arrival at a foreign port, the containers, still unopened, may be unloaded and freighted inland to their ultimate destination.

No More Higgledy-Piggledy. Containers promise to scrape away some of the shipping industry’s most persistent barnacles. Conventional freighters waste expensive time in port loading and unloading higgledy-piggledy, with cumbersome nets and slings. With specially built cranes, the containers can be moved into “cellulized” holds so swiftly that a vessel that might otherwise have to stay in port for, say, 72 hours, can now get out in twelve. This alone can cut the cost of transoceanic shipping by more than 25%. Beyond that, the containers are hard to pilfer—so much so that Matson Navigation Co. saves $1,000,000 a year by their use.

Although containers have been used by a few U.S. ship operators for a decade, the system has really taken hold only lately. Last week the Moore-McCormack freighter Mormacahair steamed through the stormy Atlantic to Antwerp with that ocean’s first regularly scheduled commercial container cargo. In mid-March, U.S. Lines will begin weekly sailings from New York to Europe with the first of four vessels specially fitted to stack containers in their holds like bricks in a wall. American Export Isbrandtsen Lines is converting two ore carriers for container service. San Francisco-based American President Lines last week announced plans to switch nearly all of its transpacific freighter service to container ships by 1967.

Though container shipping may not solve all of the industry’s many problems, its enthusiasts insist that it will turn out to be the biggest and best switch since steam replaced sails.