Sea Containers America Inc history

By 1986, the company was strapped for cash, due to its inability to sell its containerships quickly at the price Sherwood wanted and the drop in the number of American tourists booking at its European luxury hotels or riding the Orient Express.

On Monday, November 23, 1987, Clark filed a patent called the “Method for converting one or more steel shipping containers into a habitable building”.

On Tuesday, August 8, 1989, Clark was presented with his approved patent #US4854094A.

He also caused a big flap on June 23, 1990, when the Hoverspeed SeaCat "Hoverspeed Great Britain" broke the trans-Atlantic speed record for passenger ships and won the prestigious Hales Trophy, the Blue Riband of the Atlantic.

Revenge may have been sweet, as Stena AB laid off workers in 1991 because of mounting losses in the U.K. ferry operations it bought from Sea Containers.

During 1992, in what may have been a defense against another takeover attempt, Sea Containers announced a dual capitalization proposal.

The Hoverspeed Great Britain was soon joined by other SeaCats in the company's ferry fleet, replacing Hoverspeed's hovercraft, and by 1993, there were six SeaCat routes, including one between Argentina and Uruguay and one in Australia.

Among the company's other forward-looking activities was the work going on in its container factories, including materials to reduce the weight of containers and new refrigerants to comply with new international regulations that would take effect in 1995.

New ferry services opened between Scotland and Northern Ireland and between Liverpool and Dublin and, in 1997, the company launched its SuperSeaCat on the Dover-Calais ferry route.

"Blue Riband of the Atlantic Exhibition," Hoverspeed press release, October 22, 1998.

Expects Substantial Increase," press release, June 9, 1999.

The following year the company signed an agreement to buy two Italian-built tilting trains for the line, to come into service in 2000.

The first of 14 residential shipping container complexes now built in the UK is completed in 2001.

In 2002, the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach were the top two United States ports for containerized exports and imports, handling 7,244,000 TEUs (twenty equivalent units-a 20 foot container is one TEU; a 40 foot container is two TEUs).

Modern container shipping celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2006.

Known as the Redondo Beach House, the home was approved under the national Uniform Building Code (One of the predecessors of the IBC) and was completed in 2007.

BBC, the British Broadcasting Company, used GPS technology to track a single container on its months-long voyage around the world in September of 2008.

In 2010, Freight Farms establishes the first use of containers for agriculture.

Containers of Hope (2011)

By 2013, 90% of global trade is seaborne, shipped in 700 million containers every year.

26 April 2016 marks the 60th anniversary of the maiden voyage of the Ideal X and the birth of modern container shipping, a development that played a critical role in spurring the global economy.

The graph below shows how the import vs export numbers (along with domestic uses of containers between these ports or to the interior of the country) vary by port, as of 2019.