What The Tech?! Container Ships

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1 Sept 2025

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One of the most obvious features of our modern world is the way things interconnect. While this typically will make us think of things like smartphones and the internet, the reality is that this runs far deeper than just that.

A great way to understand this in more detail is to look at the food cycle. While in the earlier days, countries were far more self-reliant, the evolution of modern freight means that food imports and exports are now far more common. This would have a lasting impact on our logistical system, create new inventions and see us shipping goods around the world each and every day.

To help bring this to life, we’d need the shipping container and a cargo ship with which to carry it. Today, the Cargo Ship is the star of the show, and it sure is one interesting tale.

Break Bulk

More often than not, the modern world is insanely efficient. With autoloading cranes playing a key part in helping to keep productivity moving, it’s pretty easy to forget that things weren’t always this way. More importantly, it wasn’t that long ago (contextually speaking) that things were very, very different, and Break Bulk freight helps to highlight just how much things have changed

The shipping container would help breakbulk freight become a thing of the past for Western nations. Source: Wikipedia.

From the birth of the maritime age through to the mid-1950s, Breakbulk freight would power the world. But, like most things in life, it would come with a trade-off that would inevitably see it succumb to its biggest flaw. Namely, the more freight that was shipped, the less efficient break-bulk methods would become.

This was because the freight would have to be manually handled at every step of the way, being loaded, unloaded and stored manually by Stevedores. While this would work in the pre-connected era, for globalisation to occur smoothly, this would have to change.

The payoff for making these changes would be rich, as it would help to streamline the loading and unloading process too. Surprisingly, though, while containerised shipping has seen large-scale adoption across most countries, it’s not unheard of for break-bulk cargoes to still be carried in some countries or at the back end of the freight process.

The shipping container would be the basis for the revolution. Source: Wikipedia.

The Shipping Container

While it makes sense to have a standardised container system to streamline transportation at every step of the process, this really underplays just how revolutionary the shipping container was to the industry. This humble little metal box had some very cool features that helped it to make its mark.

The first would be its standardisation. With globally aligned standards, the containers were manufactured in specific sizes (20ft and 40ft) that enabled containers to be packed quickly and reliably while remaining weatherproof or even chilled.

Its next feature would be its inter-modal design that allowed it to bypass the break-bulk flaws entirely. No longer would cargo have to be optimised according to the mode of transport. Now, trucks, railcars and container ships could accept individual containers with no reloading required, providing an instant boost to productivity.

Panamax and Neopanamax ships clear the Panama canal with mere inches to spare. Source: Wikipedia.

There’s one more quiet feature to acknowledge though, and it’s this feature that would help to provide the giant cargo ships we are used to seeing in the modern era. The containers' simple, yet elegant interlocking design would enable them to be safely stacked in a way that would provide resilience while transiting the open ocean.

Now, we have nearly all the features needed for our modern cargo ships to thrive!

Panamax Class

We’ve got the ships, and now we’ve got the containers. And, thanks to modern construction, we’d also get new routes to open up the world. And for container ships, the Panama Canal would be hugely influential.

Providing a shorter route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the dimensions of the original Canal would help to set the standard for early container ships.

With the Canal’s loch system working to a specific set of dimensions, it would create an entire line of ships that were built to maximise freight levels through the canal. Known as the Panamax class, these ships could carry up to 5,000 containers while still transiting the locks with mere inches to spare.

The canal would influence military design too. The Iowa-class battleship would be built to ensure it could transit the Panama Canal. Here’s USS Missouri passing the Miraflores Locks. Source: Wikipedia.

In the modern era though, efficiency grinds on, and as such, modifications to the canal in the late 2010s would help to kick off an ever larger class of ship. Known as the new Panamax class, this would enable a massive increase in tonnage to be shipped through the canal. With early Panamax loads capped at around 52,500 DWT, New Panamax ships could carry more than twice the load, being rated at more than 120,00 DWT.

Overall, we see the importance of the Canal simply by looking at the traffic numbers that pass through. When it first opened, it would serve just 1000 ships, while in 2008, nearly 15,000 would transit the canal. While things like drought and COVID would affect freight volume, the future geopolitical importance of the Canal remains high.

Now And The Future

Freight by ship provides a cheap way to move products across the globe, but in their current state, there’s no denying the impact that large ships leave on things like the environment. So it makes sense that many of the improvements we see on modern ships focus on optimising the systems that help make sea freight so effective.

The most modern container ships are truly impressive. Source: Wikipedia

While the Panama Canal is hugely important, it isn’t the only game in town. The Ultra Large Container Vessel class can ship freight, free of the constraints of Panamax class ships. This would spawn a massive class of ships, up to 400m long, with a beam of around 50m.

The would feature engines that had features to enable reductions in fuel consumption along with a subsequent reduction in emissions to boot. Scale would also be hugely helpful here, as these larger ships could move more containers per voyage, providing an overall efficiency boost in comparison to smaller ships.

This Wikipedia images help to provide scale regarding the size of modern container ships. Source: Wikipedia

Future designs aim to go even further, though. By optimising hydrodynamic design to lower drag while using hybrid engine systems to recapture expended energy, future designs should help to tackle some of the current issues the industry is facing

While maritime freight in its current form isn’t without its issues, plenty of effort (and money) is being expended on finding solutions to help rectify some of these problems.

What The Tech is our recurring, twice-monthly piece that looks at the technology that was essential in shaping our modern world.

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