Container Information and the history of them.

A shipping container is essentially a large rigid steel box used to transport goods around the world via the shipping companies. Shipping lines transport around 250 million 20foot long shipping containers a year. There are roughly 40 to 65 million shipping containers that are in existence. Most of your household goods come across the sea in shipping containers so have to be designed for the most harshest of conditions. This means a shipping container is perfect for self storage due to their rugged steel design. They are extremely over engineered when used for self storage purposes as they have strong and substantial doors able to accommodate the largest of locks, weigh over 2 tonne and from a security perspective, are superb on a self storage facility. Container Storage In Carlisle uses brand new shipping containers on their self storage facility to keep your contents as fresh as the day you placed them inside one. What an easy life a shipping container has when sited on a storage facility! Also, storing goods inside a shipping container is cost effective - due to so many shipping containers being manufactured year in year out to a rigid design specification, it means purchasing shipping containers to be used in a self storage environment is highly cost effective as the low costs are passed on to the consumer.

A lot of people are now very curious about shipping containers and the alternative uses for them. In the news you have probably seen reports of people using used ones for homes, or converting them into sheds. We make use of superb brand new ones capable of holding furniture over long periods of time. But who came up with the idea of the humble shipping container? Malcom McLean, an American businessman born 1913 invented the modern intermodal shipping container. Even up to 1956 cargo across the world was loaded by hand. By 1957 the first container ship "Gateway City" ran a shipping service between New York, Florida and Texas.

Shipping containers revolutionized transport and international trade in the second half of the twentieth century. It led to a significant reduction in the cost of freight transportation by eliminating the need for repeated handling of individual pieces of cargo. It improved reliability, resulted in reduced cargo theft, and cut costs by reducing transit time. More on Malcom McLean can be found on his Wikipedia page.

A shipping container for those who are totally oblivious to such things are often defined as meaning a standardized container designed for intermodal freight transport, which broadly speaking means they can be used to ferry goods and cargo across different types of available transport from a ships at docks, to HGV's without unloading and reloading their cargo.

Of course, the reason shipping containers were needed was efficiency. Before Malcom McLean invented what's basically a metal box, all goods had to be unloaded and re-loaded mainly by hand at the docks. However, by the 1970s, industry standards were created in order to enable a more consistent loading and transporting of goods globally.

The self storage industry benefits massively from shipping containers as they are sufficiently strong and watertight to hold all manner of items in the secure environment of a self storage compound - after all, if container units are designed for going around the world, being permanently parked up in a storage depot is an easy life for them.

In the world there are various sizes of shipping container units ranging from 10 foot up to 45 foot in length. However, Container Storage Carlisle have a handy range of sizes in stock, but industry standard 20 foot ones are far by the most popular size available for rental on our storage site as they tend to hold an average three bedroom home with ease, sometimes as much as a four bedroom home.

We can talk about shipping containers in our sleep as we've been in the business for many years, but take a look at another Wikipedia link that follows, it discusses in amazing depth the history of shipping containers, titled "Intermodal Containers" - If you're into that sort of thing!