History: Containerization                Containerization has a very long and storied history. The idea of containerization started more than 50 years ago, according to the US Army Transportation Museum. During World War II, the United States Army realized that the transportation they were using was taking too much time. The Army narrowed down the problem to the loading and unloading of the shipments from the ships. The Transportation Corps, a division of the Army, started working on prototypes in which every crate would be standardized. These prototypes were commonly referred to as the “Transporters”. The Army used these to mainly ship household goods, to bases, throughout the United States and overseas.             Then, during the Korean War, 100 “Transporters” were used to ship supplies for the United States Army from Japan to Korea, for the Far East Command. The Army found that at the Port of Pusan, they were losing about ten percent of their supplies due to breakage and theft. Once the containers were implemented not only did it drastically reduce the breakage but nearly eliminated the theft. Aside from improving those two items, the biggest improvement came from the total ship time. By using the containers the Army reduced the ship time almost in half, from about 55 days to about 27 days.             Moving forward to the Vietnam Conflict, almost every major Army unit used the Container Express (CONEX) boxes to ship their supplies into Vietnam. This provided a use for the CONEX boxes that the Transportation Corps did not foresee; they were used as shelters. The Army used them as “command posts, dispensaries, portable stores, bunkers, and so forth.” During this time period the private sectors started to see the large improvements in shipping that the military was making, so commercial company began to use the CONEX boxes. Sea-Land Container Services, Inc. was the first company to use container only ships. The advances in the containerized shipping developed by the United States Army helped to greatly improve Inter-modal shipping, and increase global shipping overall, thus truly launching globalization to a new level.   Anonymous. History and Development of the Container. 2006. 11 May 2009. http://www.transchool.eustis.army.mil/museum/CONEX.htm