IF MOST PEOPLE WERE ASKED to list the inventions that have done most to shape our lives, I imagine that they would come up with the internal combustion engine, the telephone and the television. As for their inventors, they might struggle to link the first with a particular individual but the names of Alexander Graham Bell and John Logie Baird would probably emerge after a little prompting.

More recent members of that elite group might be Tim Berners-Lee, the godfather of the internet, and Steve Jobs, the trunk on which the Apple and the iPod grew. It is safe to assume that few would name Malcom (sic) McLean as a seminal influence on daily life in the 21st century. Yet it is arguable, and Marc Levinson makes the case persuasively in this book, that MacLean ought to be up there with Berners-Lee and that eccentric Yorkshireman who invented the cat’s eyes, Percy Shaw.

McLean can reasonably claim to be the man who conceived the idea of container shipping to replace the traditional break-bulk method of handling dry goods. Containers produced a huge reduction in port handling costs, contributing significantly to lower freight charges and, in turn, boosting trade flows. Almost everything we consume spends some time in a container, or on a pallet — that other hugely significant unsung breakthrough of our time.

Recently, container ports have been big news in the US. Hillary Clinton made political capital out of popular worries about Arabs owning pieces of American heritage after a recent takeover battle. Even The New York Times has huffed and puffed about port security, an issue that featured less frequently in its editorials when New York and New Jersey container terminals were run by P&O. It is true that containerisation poses challenges for customs officials. But it is hard to see why those challenges would be more severe because of a change in the share register of the parent company.

But Levinson’s concern is business history on a grand scale. He tells a moral tale. There are villains — mainly East Coast union organisers who held out long after the horse had bolted, practically destroying the New York docks in the process. And there is one larger than life hero: Malcom McLean, who bizarrely adopted that spelling of his first name late in life. He was a Scot from a small town in the swamp country of North Carolina, settled by Highlanders in the late 18th century. He began in business as a small-time trucker whose rigorous approach to cost control allowed him to undercut the competition. His breakthrough came in 1953, when he saw that by putting truck trailers on coastal ships he could avoid expensive trips down crowded highways. From there it was a short step to fitting freighters with their own cranes, allowing them to load and unload truck containers detached from their wheelbase. The final steps were to standardise container size and equip ports with cranes able to load and unload ever larger ships in hours. The cost implications were dramatic. Loading loose cargo on a medium-size cargo ship in 1956 cost $5.86 a ton: McLean’s new container ports could do it for just under 16 cents.

There are few examples before the IT revolution of such a dramatic cost improvement almost overnight. It threw the traditional American ports, and soon London, into turmoil. The unions could see that the docker's privileged position was over. What to do? The West Coast unions accepted the inevitable and did a deal that produced enhanced pensions for laid-off longshoremen and allowed containers into unionised ports. In New York and London it was a different story. The unions adopted a Canute-like posture and business moved to New Jersey and Felixstowe. The container had won, and now it is hard to imagine a world without it. Levinson draws some rather straightforward conclusions from this story and positions McLean as a visionary prophet even though his hero’s next venture resulted in what is still one of the world’s largest bankruptcies.

But is it right that all important advances have been made by bold individual entrepreneurs? Maybe not. The other ground-breaking development in freight transport is the returnable wooden pallet. There are More than ten million in Britain alone, painted blue and branded Chep. You can see stacks of them behind every supermarket in the country.

Was Chep another inventor from South Carolina? Indeed not. Chep is an acronym, standing for Commonwealth Handling and Equipment Pool — the Commonwealth in this case being the Australian one. Chep pallets were part of a scheme for nationalising food distribution in Australia, devised for their postwar Labour government by the consultants Arthur D. Little, which, thankfully, was never implemented. Nationalising food supply is the surest route to famine one can devise, as a number of African countries have shown.

The one good idea from the scheme was the standard-size returnable pallet, which has revolutionised food distribution wherever it is introduced. Distributors rent a certain number of pallets, which are held in a pool, but do not have to track or return particular ones. Fortunately, Tony Blair is unaware that the ubiquitous blue pallets are a socialist hangover, otherwise no doubt they would be banned, or obliged to carry ID cards.

Levinson’s next subject should be “The Pallet”. In the meantime, he has produced a fascinating exposition of the romance of the steel container. I’ll never look at a truck in the same way again.

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