Nearly six decades ago, Keith W. Tantlinger built a boxor, more accurately, the corners of a box. It was a seemingly small invention but a vital one: It 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.
Tantlinger’s box, large, heavy and metal, is known as the shipping container. Though he did not invent the box itself, 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 to trucks and trains far more easily, and cheaply, than ever before.
Thus, without ever intending to, Tantlinger, an engineer who died at 92 on Aug. 27 in Escondido, Calif., helped bring about the vast web of international trade that is a fact of 21st-century life.
The New York Times
