New ships were also needed for expanding intercontinental car exports. The American market opened up first to Volkswagen’s Beetle (the first car imported already in 1949) and then to small Japanese designs (the Toyopet since 1958, Honda N600 since 1969, and Honda Civic since 1973), and new roll-on/roll-off vessels (…

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Making the switch to alternatives would do us a lot of good; because shipping alone accounts for 3 percent of all emissions, using clean fuels would give us a meaningful reduction. Unfortunately, the fuel that container ships run on—it’s called bunker fuel—is dirt cheap, because it’s made from the dregs of the oil-refining process. Since their curr

Bone marrow, for example, sold for as much as $23,000 a gram (compared with $60 a gram for cocaine).

Two types of freight appear to have filled those first containers crossing the Atlantic: whiskey on the westbound run, military goods on the voyage to Europe. Liquor exporters had long complained of huge losses to theft on the docks, and convincing them to use containers was not a hard sell.