It sounds so obvious now — how else would you ship goods from one place to another? — but what happened that day was revolutionary. Remember "On The Waterfront," the Marlon Brando film about the rough life of dock workers? That's how a port used to operate before the container: hundreds of longshoremen would load and unload packages and boxes from ships — and then reload the packages onto trucks. It was cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. According to Mr. Levinson, before the era of the container, shipping could add as much as 25 percent to the cost of certain commodities, and "ocean freight costs alone accounted for 12 percent of the value of U.S. exports." With that much sand in the wheels, a truly global economy just wasn't possible.

The man who sent the Ideal-X from Newark to Houston was Malcom P. McLean, and one of the points Mr. Levinson makes about him is that he was new to the shipping business. Mr. McLean was an ambitious, self-made, cost-obsessed, 43-year-old trucking magnate, who had become increasingly frustrated with the sheer inefficiency of moving goods from one place to another. "Freight," he liked to say, "is a cost added to the price of goods."

Mr. McLean understood that reducing freight costs meant getting ships in and out of ports in hours instead of days, moving goods out of ships and onto trains and trucks faster, cutting out labor costs, and integrating the various forms of transportation. Having exporters put their goods in a container, where they remained until they arrived at their final destination, accomplished all of that and more.

Journalists and academics often argue over whether people shape history or whether historical forces shape people. The story of the container gives plenty of ammunition to both. On the one hand, there is not much doubt that had Mr. McLean not sent the Ideal-X on its maiden container voyage, someone else would have done so eventually; the inefficiencies of transportation were crying out for reform and ingenuity.

On the other hand, Mr. McLean spent most of his life (he died in 2001) dragging the rest of the transportation industry kicking and screaming into the container age. Containers were his obsession. The key moment came during the Vietnam War, when Mr. McLean proved to the United States military, which had become increasingly frustrated at the difficulty of shipping materiel to the war zone, that his way was the only possible solution. Once the armed forces became converts, there was no turning back.

One thing I find appealing about the container story is how this overlooked revolution contains all the same lessons you will find in higher-profile case studies of the Internet or the personal computer. For instance: as containerization took hold, the first movers like Mr. McLean eventually gave way to bigger, stronger, better-capitalized companies, which now dominate the global shipping business. (Mr. McLean's company filed for bankruptcy in 1986, after he built some expensive, slow-moving ships at the exact wrong moment.)

There were huge battles over standards. If containers were going to be able to move easily from ships to trucks to trains, what size should they be? What kind of mechanism should be used to lock and unlock them into place?