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TOM SCOTT: Our civilisation relies on these.

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This is a shipping container. 8 feet, by 8
feet, by 20 feet, made of steel and plywood.

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And they are everywhere. On every continent.

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Almost everywhere that there are humans, there
are shipping containers.

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They’re used as storage, as shops, as homes,
even an Antarctic base.

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But most importantly: they’re used for moving
stuff.

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Before shipping containers were invented,
everything transported by ship would be a

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different size and in a different package.

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And it’d take a week to load and unload
even a small cargo ship.

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But now: almost everything goes by container,
and the ships are loaded by giant cranes.

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Like these, the largest in the world, at London
Gateway.

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JAMES RAY: Below us we have got the Cap San
Marco. It’s a 300m long vessel.

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We’ve currently got four gantry cranes working
on it; it should be here for roughly 12 hours.

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TOM: And in that twelve hours, you move how
many containers?

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JAMES: Approximately we’ll be moving just
over 1100 containers, both discharge and load.

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TOM: All in 12 hours?

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JAMES: All in 12 hours.

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There is a worldwide network of containers
and ports. It’s like an internet for physical things.

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In the same way that standardising on the
internet meant that

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all computers could talk to each other, standardising
on the shipping container

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meant that all the ports, worldwide, could
just send stuff to each other.

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COSMIN CARSTEA: You see a container has just
been brought to our post,

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and now is going all the way, full speed.

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TOM: And that’s all automatic?

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COSMIN: That’s all automatic.

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TOM: And so that’s basically just an enormous
robot.

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COSMIN: Yeah. It is 200 tonnes of robot. It
takes it, it puts it in the stack.

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It’s a temporary storage area for the containers.
A big 3D puzzle.

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From the stack to the vessel, we have equipment
called “shuttle”.

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It’s a very powerful, very fast machine
that has lifting capability,

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as well as useful horizontal transfer.

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It’s like a truck and a crane at the same
time.

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And from there, our 2,000 tonne quay cranes
will take it, like a snowflake,

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and put it in the right location, safely on
the vessel.

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TOM: Let’s say you’re in China, selling
10,000 widgets to a supermarket in the UK.

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You don’t have to worry about how they’re
going to get there,

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you just put them in a container, you take
it to a port, and it vanished into the system.

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And barring disaster, a few days later after
it’s been routed on ships,

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and through transhipping ports, essentially
routers: it arrives at its destination port.

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At the port, the container is loaded onto
a truck or a train.

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Because the containers are all standardized,
every mode of transport can just accept them.

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And then it’s taken off to the supermarket’s
distribution centre,

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where it’s emptied, and the contents sent
off to individual shops.

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Increasingly, the supermarkets are doing that
here, because, well,

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why have a distribution centre and that extra
journey when you can just do it at the port?

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Here’s the important point: it doesn’t
matter what’s in the container.

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It’s just a box that fits into the patterns
of literally millions of other boxes

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that are moving around the globe at any point
in time.

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Unless there’s dangerous cargo, not even
the crew on the ship know about the contents.

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Whisky was one of the first things sent by
container.

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There used to be a lot of accidental breakages
of whisky, I can’t imagine why, but suddenly,

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they magically stopped once the bottles were
inside a sealed metal box.

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Heck, someone once tried to send himself halfway
round the world by container,

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and he nearly managed it.

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The vast majority of things that are made
in one country, and sold in another country,

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are sent in containers.

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World trade relies of this network of physical
things just as much as it does the internet.

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Our civilisation really does hold together
because of these metal boxes and these giant cranes.

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