This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Cars, house paint, fertilizer. Look around you. Pretty much everything was delivered in a shipping container.

There are 20 million shipping containers now in the world, carried by 6,000 container vessels,

all moving literal tons of stuff back and forth over the ocean.

And it all started in 1956 when a trucker by the name of Malcolm McLean had an amazingly good idea.

What if there was a container that could come off a ship full

of goods and attach to a truck or a train? No need to move the goods from one container to the next.

Goodbye to all the time and labor spent loading and unloading.

McLean believed the shipping container could revolutionize the way goods moved

around the world.

Malcolm McClain became a very, very wealthy man.

By 1982, he was actually one of the 400 richest Americans,

because, of course, the shipping container did

revolutionize the way goods move. That's reporter Nicola Twilly. New deeper

ports were built for new deeper ships carrying more products.

A cargo vessel in the late 1960s needed a crew of 50.

A container ship five times the size needed just 18 people.

Meanwhile on shore, roughly three quarters of the hundreds of thousands of duck workers who were needed to move goods on and off ships,

ended up losing their jobs.

It only took one guy to operate the crane

that lifted these big boxes.

McLean's idea had created an incredibly more efficient

global shipping industry, but there was still one major problem.

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