McLean's - American Shipper

Arecent telecast from Dubai Ports World showed panoramicviews of the sprawling terminal at Dubai’sJebel Ali Port, thrust suddenly into unwonted limelightbecause of a furor in the United States over Dubai Ports’purchase of a terminal management company with facilitiesin six American seaports.Dubai’s impressive skyline of apartment buildings and officestructures reared up behind the port. But more eye-grabbingwere thousands upon thousands of stacked containers in theforeground that, when seen end-on, looked like myriad tinyboxes holding Chinese fans.The news anchorpersons on camera, using the port as background,talked only about the slim but nonetheless hysteriaprovokingchance that one of those containers might hold aweapon of mass destruction bound for the United States.In doing so, they missed the real story: the massed containersthemselves, which have in only 50 years revolutionizedworld trade as nothing before them since the time that steamengines were put on ships.An American entrepreneur named Malcom McLean, who“Malcom McLean is oneof the few men whochanged the world.”Walter B. Wristondied at the age of 87 in thespring of 2001, was the primecatalyst in triggering the tradetsunami that containerizationbecame. But he was not the firstby any generous measure to think of putting cargo-carryingvehicles on ships.That does not diminish McLean’s iconic status in the transportationindustry, to the point that one determinant of shippingliteracy is to spell his first name correctly with a single “l.”American Shipper asked several of McLean’s associateswhat they remember most vividly about him, and what hewould think of today’s post-9/11 trading world. Much informationwas also drawn from a forthcoming book, The BoxThat Changed The World, by Arthur Donovan and JosephBonney.AMERICAN SHIPPER: APRIL 2006 9