When talking about worldwide benchmarks, people use the term "global standard." A standard means a norm. A standard is a promise that spans the economy, industry, and technology. Technological progress can make a "standard" necessary, but a single standard can also drive a leap of revolutionary scale. The Korean Agency for Technology and Standards and ChosunBiz selected the "top 10 standards that changed the world" and the "top 10 standards that changed the lives and economy of Koreans," based on a survey of experts from industry, academia, research, and media, and reexamine the role of standards. [Editor's note]
It is now an era when domestic consumers can buy goods from the U.S. e-commerce company Amazon and receive them within a week without paying shipping fees. Unlike Coupang or China's Ali and Temu, Amazon has no domestic logistics center. Even so, it was able to cut shipping expense and speed up delivery thanks to ocean transport.
Ocean transport accounts for 80% to 90% of global trade volume by weight. According to Linerlytica, a Singapore-based maritime market analysis agency, the world's container shipping throughput last year is expected to have surpassed 1 billion TEU for the first time ever. TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) is one 20-foot (about 6 meters) container. Over the past year, 1 billion containers were loaded onto ships and moved across the seas.
The explosive growth of ocean transport was largely driven by the standardization of container specifications. The method of using containers in ocean transport is known to have been first devised in the 1950s by U.S. trucking operator Malcolm McLean. Ocean transport was possible at the time, but it took a lot of time and expense for people to move boxes of all shapes and weights. In 1956, McLean loaded 58 metal containers onto the container ship "Ideal-X," a converted surplus military tanker, and sailed from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas, in 1956.
Container transport slashed loading expense from $5.83 per ton to 15.8 cents. Even so, until 1962, containerized cargo accounted for only 8% of all freight at the Port of New York. Ports dedicated to container transport had not been built, and longshore unions resisted the introduction of container ships over concerns about workforce cuts.
The Vietnam War then became the catalyst for the popularization of container transport. The United States realized there was no tool as useful as containers for shipping large volumes of military supplies to the battlefield and moved to standardize container shipping. In 1968, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) set 20-foot (about 6 meters) and 40-foot (about 12 meters) containers as international standards. Cranes and terminal equipment at ports around the world were unified to match container standards.
Containers became a symbol of the logistics revolution. The world trade growth rate jumped from an annual average of 7.8% in 1961–1965 to 11.1% in 1966–1970, when container ships began full operation, and then grew 22.6% a year in 1971–1975.