RIP: Keith Tantlinger

Keith Tantlinger died recently at the age of 92. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of him; you’re not alone. But his invention (or innovation, really) changed the world.

Nearly six decades ago, Keith W. Tantlinger built a box — or, more accurately, the corners of a box. It was a seemingly small invention, but a vital one: it set in motion a chain of events that changed the way people buy and sell things, transformed the means by which nations do business and ultimately gave rise to the present-day global economy.

Mr. Tantlinger’s box, large, heavy and metal, is known as the shipping container. Though he did not invent it (such containers had been in use at least since the 19th century to haul heavy cargo like coal), he is widely credited with having created, in the 1950s, the first commercially viable modern one.

The crucial refinements he made — including a corner mechanism that locks containers together — allowed them to be hefted by crane, stacked high in ships and transferred from shipboard to trucks and trains far more easily, and cheaply, than ever before.

Thus, without ever intending to, Mr. Tantlinger, an engineer who died at 92 on Aug. 27 and who had long worked out of the limelight, helped bring about the vast web of international trade that is a fact of 21st-century life. More than any other innovation, the modern shipping container — by turns venerated and castigated — is now acknowledged to have been the spark that touched off globalization.

Posted by on September 8th, 2011 at 10:02 am


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