On a foggy Wednesday morning last week, the container ship CSCL Globe slowly glided into the harbor at the Port of Felixstowe, a container port located on England’s eastern shore.
While that’s not an unusual sight — Felixstowe is the UK’s busiest container port and the sixth largest port in Europe — what was remarkable was the container ship’s size. The Chinese-owned CSCL Globe currently is the world’s largest container ship, capable of carrying an astounding 19,100 cargo containers.
Not the Record-Holder for Long
The ship surpassed the previous record-holder –the Matz Maersk Triple E, which has a capacity of 18,000 cargo containers — as the world’s biggest ship. But it will soon be beaten out by the MSC Oscar, which was scheduled to set sail last Saturday from the berth in Busan, South Korea, where it was built.
The MSC Oscar has an incredible cargo capacity that is capable of transporting 39,000 cars , 117 million pairs of gym shoes, or more than 900 million cans of dog food on any single trip.
Bigger and Bigger Cargo Ships
So why are cargo containers suddenly becoming so enormous? And what does it mean for the materials handling industry?
The concept of creating super-sized ships first began back in the 1950s, when a trucking company owner in North Carolina named Malcolm McLean became frustrated on how long it took dock workers in New York harbor to hand load shipments of cotton he had transported onto ships bound for Instanbul.
McLean came up with the idea of using cranes to load and unload truck trailers directly on the the decks of ships. In 1956, he converted an old oil tanker in to the world’s first cargo container ship, which he christened the Ideal X. The ship had a capacity of 58 containers that could be arranged on the deck side-by-side.
The following year, McLean launched another ship — the Gateway City –that could carry 226 containers. this time stacked vertically onto racks.
A Ship-Building Arms Race
Over the course of the next decade, McLean and his new company, Pan American, continued to build larger and larger ships that had increasingly bigger cargo capacities. His innovative system of using cranes to load and unload containers filled with cargo –rather than the old system of using block and tackle to move nets filled with crates and other packages — saved time and money and was soon adopted by other shipping companies.
Eventually, the size of the cargo containers became standardized. And by the end of the 1970s, most consumer goods arrived in the US via cargo container ships.
Shippers realized that the bigger the capacity of their ships, the less it would cost them to transport products across the seas. This led to a virtual arms race between shippers, as each one tried to outdo the other in terms of the size and capacity of their vessels. This is where we find ourselves today, with ships like the MSC Oscar making the earliest cargo container vessels look dwarfish.
Larger Ships Require Bigger Facilities
To accommodate these new giants, ports had to be deepened and widened. Huge storage yards featuring towering cranes were built in places like Hamburg, Germany; Shanghai, China; and Long Beach, California. And these yards were connected to rail lines and trucking terminals.
This year, an wider and deeper Panama Canal will allow super-sized cargo containers known as Panamax ships to reach East Coast ports from Asia for the first time.
How big will cargo ships get before they can’t get any bigger? Nobody knows. But it’s likely that one day the world’s biggest ship will make the MSC Oscar look tiny in comparison.