Born in 1913 in Maxton, North Carolina, Malcom McLean had no money for college, so he bought a used truck and founded McLean Trucking with his brother Jim and sister Clara, hauling empty tobacco barrels. Waiting for hours at ports, he watched longshoremen load break bulk cargo piece by piece at about $5.86 per ton while ships sat idle. His first idea, rolling whole truck trailers onto ships, wasted space, and regulations barred a trucking firm from owning a shipping line. So he took a $22 million loan, bought two World War II T2 tankers in January 1956, and on April 26, 1956 sent the Ideal X from Port Newark to Houston with 58 containers on deck. Loading costs fell to 16 cents per ton.

McLean built Sea-Land Service into a global line, then made a counterintuitive move: he released his container patents royalty free to the International Organization for Standardization so every port would build for one box. A Vietnam War contract brought in 40 percent of revenue, and in 1969 R.J. Reynolds bought Sea-Land for $530 million. His later bet on huge, slow, fuel efficient ships at United States Lines collapsed when oil prices fell, ending in a 1986 bankruptcy with $1.3 billion in debt. At 78 he started again with Trailer Bridge.

• A longshoremen’s union official at the 1956 launch said he wished the ship would sink.
• Container maker Roy Fruehauf pushed McLean toward strict standardization.
• Sea-Land opened a 101 acre terminal at Port Newark in 1963.
• McLean went from the Forbes 400 in 1982 to Chapter 11 four years later.
• On the morning of his 2001 funeral, container ships worldwide sounded their whistles.