In 1956, a trucker named Malcolm McLean sent a ship to sea with 58 containers on its deck. He wasn’t trying to change the world. He did anyway.
That’s the story at the heart of the latest episode of Soundings, our new podcast hosted by San Pedro Today writer/photographer Aaron McKenzie. His guest is economist and journalist Marc Levinson, whose acclaimed book The Box is widely considered the definitive account of how a simple steel container transformed the global economy.
Anyone who lives in San Pedro knows the container by sight—stacked in candy-colored rows across the Port of Los Angeles, rolling past on trucks and trains at all hours. But as Levinson explains, the container’s impact goes far beyond the waterfront. It rewired labor, reshaped cities, made globalization possible, and helped lift billions of people out of poverty—consequences no one, least of all McLean, could have predicted.
Levinson spent a decade investigating how a “tin can” became one of the most important inventions of the 20th century, and his conversation with McKenzie brings that history home to the harbor that lives with it every day.
The episode is available below, on YouTube here, and wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also watch/listen to the first episode of Soundings featuring British journalist and biographer Howard Sounes as they discuss one of San Pedro’s most famous residents, the late writer and poet, Charles Bukowski. spt
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