April 26, 1956....

We all know of famous battles, the birth and deaths of politicians, great treaties and agreements, etc. but we know little about the more mundane dates marking the changes that have created gigantic changes in peoples daily lives.

So, April 26, 1956 marks which date? It is the date that a young American trucking executive, figured that the big costs to shipping goods revolved around the transfer of goods between modes of transaportation and shipped the first containers between the ports of Newark and Houston revoltionizing the shipping industry....

On April 26, 1956, the Ideal-X steamed out of Newark carrying 58 converted truck trailers to Houston on the world's first container-ship voyage. Designed by North Carolina trucking executive Malcom McLean, containers cut the cost of loading material onto ships from nearly $6 per ton to 16 cents per ton; shrank loading time in ports from weeks to hours; and, over 20 years, raised productivity at docks a thousand-fold.

Innovation of this type, notoriously low tech in actuallity, has changed our lives in numerous and immeasureable ways. The container allowed many poorer countries to unlock the resourses, such as labor, available to them to raise the standard of their lives. And it is most notable, that this massive change had nothing to do with any "government" program or an initiative promoted by the useless United Nations but just plain old American ingenuity.