Setting the Standard

The Australian National Maritime Museum, in Sydney, has mounted an unusual exhibition about the history and consequences of the shipping container, a subject near and dear to my heart. Appropriately enough, the exhibition is housed in containers spread around the museum’s grounds.

When the organizers asked me to write a post for the museum’s blog, I took the opportunity to explain why standardization has been so important to the growth of container shipping — and asked readers to imagine how tangled world trade might be if the same basic 40-foot container was not in use everywhere. The first containers used aboard a ship in Australia were 16 feet 8 inches long. No ship in any other country has ever carried boxes of that size, and you can imagine how difficult it would be for Australia to engage in international trade if its containers couldn’t easily be used abroad. The post is here. Many thanks to the museum’s staff for coming up with some great pictures and drawings to illustrate it.

Tags: containers, standardization