A Short, Slightly Ridiculous History of Shipping (and How to Get Through Your Workday)

Your workday doesn’t have to be gloomy, grey, or one long fight with a tracking page. So before you refresh that page for the ninth time, spend five minutes with us. We’re going to travel a few thousand years, meet some genuinely questionable cargo decisions, and come back with a couple of small habits that’ll be kinder to your body, whether you spend your day at a desk or on the dock.

We’ve been hauling stuff (and complaining about it) for a very long time

Moving freight is one of civilization’s oldest headaches. The oldest surviving wooden wheel dates to roughly 3200 BC and was found in what’s now Ljubljana, Slovenia. Before the wheel, we used to move goods on sledges and on the backs of animals and people. The job has changed a lot since. The customer service and satisfaction haven’t.

The ancient Egyptians thought big. To move granite obelisks weighing around 330 tons each, Queen Hatshepsut had a special barge built and floated them down the Nile. Imagine the documentation for that one today.

The Romans fed a city of a million people by sea, and their emperors had a flair for the theatrical. Caligula commissioned an enormous ship to carry an obelisk from Egypt, and after the trip he had it deliberately sunk to help form the foundation of a new harbor. A single-use freighter. We’ve all had a shipment we’d like to handle that way, but few of us have Caligula’s budget.

Meanwhile, trade routes were bringing the world together. The Silk Road formally opened around 130 BCE, and China’s Grand Canal, the world’s longest and oldest man-made waterway, moved imperial grain for centuries and is still a UNESCO World Heritage Site today.

Things sped up from there. The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, is often called the world’s first multinational corporation. Then steam arrived. In 1838, the SS Great Western crossed the Atlantic in about 15 days, roughly half the time a sailing ship needed. Then came rail. The first US transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and the very first freight train to run west carried a load of Japanese teas.

The turning point was a metal box – or a container

The biggest leap in shipping history is smaller than you’d expect. In 1937 a, then still a trucker, named Malcolm McLean spent an entire day stuck at a New Jersey dock, watching his cargo get unloaded piece by exhausting piece. He never got over it. He grew his own company and persevered. He worked through iterations, with the first being to load entire trucks onto ships, but he realized the wheels and chassis would eat up too much space. Removing the chassis from the equation allowed containers to be stackable. On April 26, 1956, he sailed the first container ship, the Ideal-X, and cut loading costs from $5.83 a ton to about 16 cents. The Smithsonian credits that humble container with opening the door to modern globalization. That same year, the US signed the Interstate Highway Act, and the modern freight as you know it wasborn.

There’s a thread running through all of this. Shipping has always been the story of people trying to make a difficult, time-consuming job less so. Not every attempt went smoothly, mind you. In 1919, a Boston storage tank burst and sent a wave of molasses through the streets at 35 miles per hour. Cargo doesn’t always behave. Max Miller has a great episode on the disaster.

Which brings us back to you

Notice that McLean’s world-changing idea came from a wasted, restless day spent on his feet. Your body has opinions about days like that too, and it doesn’t much matter whether you’re locked to a screen or moving pallets.

For desk workers, sitting more than eight hours a day with no activity is a real health risk, though 60 to 75 minutes of daily movement offsets much of it. The fix is smaller than the problem sounds. Researchers at Columbia found that a five-minute walk every 30 minutes cut post-meal blood sugar spikes by 58%. You can think of those walks as little activity snacks throughout your day.

Standing all day isn’t the hero of the story either, as anyone on a warehouse floor already knows in their knees and lower back. NIOSH links prolonged standing to back pain, fatigue, and leg swelling. The answer for everyone is variety. A newer “saying” is that your best posture is your next posture – meaning that it’s not about sitting or standing straight. Rather, you should move as much as possible. You can also try to alternate sitting and standing, use anti-fatigue mats where you can, and wear supportive shoes.

A few more tips that cost you nothing:

• Every hour, OSHA suggests a five-minute break from screen work to stand, stretch, and look away.
• For tired eyes, try the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
• In heavier work, OSHA is blunt that breaks matter. Keep loads in the “power zone” between mid-thigh and mid-chest, and rotate tasks so your muscles get time to recover.
• Across the whole week, aim for the WHO’s 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity.

None of this asks for a gym membership or a big change in your habits. It asks you to stand up now and then, which, all things considered, McLean would have probably appreciated.

Here’s where we come in

Freightera exists to take the day-eating drudgery out of freight, the same drudgery that’s been bugging shippers since the days of the Nile barge. Instead of phone tag and holding on the line for rates, you’ll get instant online freight quotes. Instead of wrestling with paperwork, you’ll have your Bills of Lading and shipping labels generated for you. And when you’d like to talk to a person, our Client Care team is right there to help. That’s a few hours of your workday handed back to you, hours you can spend on an activity snack, or simply on not staring at a dock. We’re doing our best to give freight its new digital containers moment, if you will.

So ship green, and stress less with Freightera.

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