Malcom McLean

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Malcom McLean

Malcom Purcell McLean (born November 14, 1913 in Maxton , North Carolina , † May 25, 2001 in New York City , New York ) was an American shipowner and transport company and is considered to be the inventor of multimodal transport using containers .

Life

McLean was originally baptized with the name Malcolm , but later chose to adopt the traditional Scottish spelling of the name.

McLean was in 1913 near the small town of Maxton ( US state born North Carolina). After graduating from high school , he worked as a gas station attendant until 1935, when he bought a used truck with the money he had saved . Together with his siblings Jim and Clara McLean, he founded a small forwarding company. In the first few years the company made most of its sales with the transport of tobacco .

As early as 1937, McLean, who was working as a driver in the company himself, was annoyed by the long waiting times that arose when unloading a vehicle. Over the next few years, he developed the idea of ​​simply loading the entire trailer of a truck onto the ship and putting it back on a vehicle at the destination instead of having to laboriously carry individual boxes and sacks of goods from the truck to the ship . The system could also be transferred to trains without any problems, but initially there were no interested parties willing to finance McLean's idea. Although there have already been various ideas for transporting larger transport containers both by rail and by ship, McLean's ideas exceeded all previous approaches.

In 1955 McLean sold his shares in the McLean Trucking Company , which meanwhile had a fleet of nearly 1,800 vehicles, for 25 million US dollars . A short time later he took over the small shipping company Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company , which had been owned by the Waterman Steamship Corporation until then , for seven million US dollars. Shortly after the takeover was completed, McLean acquired two used tankers from the US Navy , which were converted into container ships under his guidance. On April 26, 1956 finally left the first of its container ships, the Ideal X , the Port of Newark (New Jersey) with the aim of Houston in Texas .

In the years that followed, both the idea of ​​using containers and McLean's Pan-Atlantic company established themselves . The first liner service was set up in 1957, and in 1960 the company was renamed Sea-Land Corporation (the company was taken over by Mærsk in 1999 and exists as a subsidiary to this day). McLean sold the company to the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company in the late 1960s and founded other successful freight forwarding companies in the years that followed. The last one was TrailerBridge in 1992 , which McLean ran until his death. He died of acute heart failure on May 25, 2001 at his home on the East Side of Manhattan in New York City .

In 2004 McLean was inducted into the Logistics Hall of Fame as an award for his achievements .

Web links

literature

  • Levinson, Marc: The Box - How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger . Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (USA) 2006, ISBN 978-0-691-13640-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Saxon: MP McLean, 87, Container Shipping Pioneer. The New York Times , May 29, 2001, accessed December 1, 2016 .