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- We are launching a whole new channel. There have been video ideas that I've pitched that don't fully belong on "Veritasium." - I've been in those pitch meetings. I've seen those. I've seen that happen. - But that doesn't mean that the videos shouldn't exist and that they aren't saying something very interesting. We need another way to tell these stories. - We at "Veritasium," we have a lot of exciting stories that we want to tell.
Same Veritasium rigour, but this time it's about social science. It's about how our complex and constantly changing world works. So that's what we're doing. We're launching a whole new channel called "InGenius." You can watch the first few minutes here, and if you like it, come to our channel, "InGenius," and you can watch the rest. This $40 hunk of metal rewired the modern world. It started a revolution that transformed China from being one of the poorest countries in the world, to a global superpower, controlling 30% of all manufacturing.
It's a story that's never been told before. How it inspires former spy, Yuan Geng, to create an island of capitalism in his home county with an invention that changes the face of communist China, spreading its influence across the world and upending the entire global economy. But the story didn't start in China, it starts with a frustrated American trucker from North Carolina. (soft blues music) In 1937, 24-year-old Malcolm McLean is driving his truck full of cotton bales from North Carolina up to Hoboken, New Jersey. At port, he waits for his truck to be unloaded, and waits, and waits.
It's painstakingly slow, almost a whole day, and that's just his one truck. He figures, what if you took the entire back of the truck and just put it directly on the ship? The whole thing would be over in a matter of minutes instead of hours. - So why don't we put that whole body on the truck? That's my first thought, you know? - The problem is, truck drivers can't control how ships are loaded. So while McLean builds a highly successful trucking empire over the next 20 years, he can only stand by and watch as the cargo issue gets worse.
This is the log from a 1954 cargo ship, the SS Warrior. 194,582 total things on the ship that would all have to be loaded and unloaded by hand, by gangs of longshoremen. It takes so long. It means if you're shipping something, you're paying twice as much for your cargo to be stuck at port than actually travelling on a ship. And it makes your cargo vulnerable to another problem. The New York and New Jersey waterfronts in the 50's are dominated by the Genovese and Gambino mafia families. Corruption, racketeering and theft are endemic.
More than $13 million of cargo is estimated to have been stolen just from those ports over a three-year period. That's more than 180 million in today's money. The upshot is, the process is so expensive that in most cases selling internationally just isn't worth it. So most consumer products stay local, make locally, sell locally. So in 1955, McLane decides to act. He's convinced his old idea of detachable truck trailers is the solution. So McLean does something drastic. He sells his 20-year-old trucking empire and gambles everything on an ocean shipping company, despite the fact that he has zero experience in the field.
But to turn his idea into reality, he needs someone who can actually build the container of his dreams. He hears about 35-year-old engineer, Keith Tantlinger, based out in Spokane, Washington, who has built a transportable metal box and even been tinkering with trying to stack it. Tantlinger's reasoning is similar to McLean. Rather than waste precious ship space with the truck or the wheels, just transport the cargo in the box from the truck to the ship in one seamless move. McLean flies Tantlinger down to his headquarters in Alabama and immediately gets him working on containers that will fit onto a converted World War II oil tanker that he just bought.
McLean renames the ship the SS Ideal X, ideal for the ideal form of transportation and X for experimentation. - It was the SpaceX of the 1950's and in many ways Malcolm McLean is the Elon Musk of his day. (soft music)
