The Father of Globalization

Keith Tantlinger, recently honored in a Telegraph (U.K.) obituary, developed the technology that launched containerized shipping. That means Tantlinger helped redraw the global economic map. Partly because of Tantlinger’s invention, Asia became the world’s workshop, pouring finished goods into retail markets worldwide. Containerization did for shipping and Asia what Henry Ford’s assembly line did for car production and the U.S.

Tantlinger, who died last month at 92, was born in Orange, California in 1919. He graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and during World War II worked for Douglas Aircraft designing tools that built B-17 bombers.

Tantlinger patented several dozen container-related inventions. His most important design feature was the slotted eyelet at each corner of the container into which a lock, called a twist-lock, could be dropped, which stabilized stacked containers. By 1957, the container ship Gateway City had taken its first shipload of cargo along the U.S. East Coast. But major progress in containerization only came after 1965, when the American Standards Association adopted a national standard based on Tantlinger’s design that did away with the many competing designs copied from Tantlinger’s invention.