Multicolored shipping containers are everywhere: piled up in stacks in ports, rolling down highways behind tractor trailers, and rumbling by on railroad flatcars. Most people don't give the ugly, utilitarian objects a second glance, except perhaps to note the names stenciled on their sides—Maersk, Hanjin, Evergreen—and probably to wonder where they come from. Nobody knows exactly how many containers there are in the world, but estimates run as high as three hundred million. What we do know is that not so long ago, there were none. Shipping containers are a recent American invention. The first full-fledged example of container shipping occurred in April 1956, when a refitted World War II tanker, the Ideal-X, sailed from Newark carrying fifty-eight containers—actually aluminum truck bodies with the wheels removed. Arriving in Houston, the bodies were unloaded, dropped onto trailer chassis, and hauled to their final destinations. On the face of it not a world-shaking event, yet it could be called the beginning of a revolution in transportation.