TOM SCOTT: Our civilisation relies on these.
This is a shipping container. 8 feet, by 8 feet, by 20 feet, made of steel and plywood.
And they are everywhere. On every continent.
Almost everywhere that there are humans, there are shipping containers.
They’re used as storage, as shops, as homes, even an Antarctic base.
But most importantly: they’re used for moving stuff.
Before shipping containers were invented, everything transported by ship would be a
different size and in a different package.
And it’d take a week to load and unload even a small cargo ship.
But now: almost everything goes by container, and the ships are loaded by giant cranes.
Like these, the largest in the world, at London Gateway.
JAMES RAY: Below us we have got the Cap San Marco. It’s a 300m long vessel.
We’ve currently got four gantry cranes working on it; it should be here for roughly 12 hours.
TOM: And in that twelve hours, you move how many containers?
JAMES: Approximately we’ll be moving just over 1100 containers, both discharge and load.
TOM: All in 12 hours?
JAMES: All in 12 hours.
There is a worldwide network of containers and ports. It’s like an internet for physical things.
In the same way that standardising on the internet meant that
all computers could talk to each other, standardising on the shipping container
meant that all the ports, worldwide, could just send stuff to each other.
COSMIN CARSTEA: You see a container has just been brought to our post,
and now is going all the way, full speed.
TOM: And that’s all automatic?
COSMIN: That’s all automatic.
TOM: And so that’s basically just an enormous robot.
COSMIN: Yeah. It is 200 tonnes of robot. It takes it, it puts it in the stack.
It’s a temporary storage area for the containers. A big 3D puzzle.
From the stack to the vessel, we have equipment called “shuttle”.
It’s a very powerful, very fast machine that has lifting capability,
as well as useful horizontal transfer.
It’s like a truck and a crane at the same time.
And from there, our 2,000 tonne quay cranes will take it, like a snowflake,
and put it in the right location, safely on the vessel.
TOM: Let’s say you’re in China, selling 10,000 widgets to a supermarket in the UK.
You don’t have to worry about how they’re going to get there,
you just put them in a container, you take it to a port, and it vanished into the system.
And barring disaster, a few days later after it’s been routed on ships,
and through transhipping ports, essentially routers: it arrives at its destination port.
At the port, the container is loaded onto a truck or a train.
Because the containers are all standardized, every mode of transport can just accept them.
And then it’s taken off to the supermarket’s distribution centre,
where it’s emptied, and the contents sent off to individual shops.
Increasingly, the supermarkets are doing that here, because, well,
why have a distribution centre and that extra journey when you can just do it at the port?
Here’s the important point: it doesn’t matter what’s in the container.
It’s just a box that fits into the patterns of literally millions of other boxes
that are moving around the globe at any point in time.
Unless there’s dangerous cargo, not even the crew on the ship know about the contents.
Whisky was one of the first things sent by container.
There used to be a lot of accidental breakages of whisky, I can’t imagine why, but suddenly,
they magically stopped once the bottles were inside a sealed metal box.
Heck, someone once tried to send himself halfway round the world by container,
and he nearly managed it.
The vast majority of things that are made in one country, and sold in another country,
are sent in containers.
World trade relies of this network of physical things just as much as it does the internet.
Our civilisation really does hold together because of these metal boxes and these giant cranes.
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